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Automate your app

All plans Member

Your app can do something on its own when it receives a submission. You pick a ready-made automation, fill in a couple of blanks, and turn it on.

There is no flow chart to draw and nothing to configure beyond the blanks. If you want to build your own logic, with conditions, delays, approvals or webhooks, that is Workflow Automation, a separate feature on Pro and above.

What you can turn on

Section titled “What you can turn on”

Email me when someone submits. When a row lands in the list you choose, we send an email to the address you choose. Useful the moment your app has a form and you would rather not keep checking it.

Copy new submissions into another list. When a row is added to one list, it is copied into another list in the same project. Columns are matched by name, so a Name column in one list fills the Name column in the other. Anything the second list has no column for is simply left out, which means the two lists do not have to match exactly.

Daily summary of new submissions. Once a day, at an hour you pick, we email how many new submissions arrived in the last 24 hours. On a day when nothing arrived, nothing is sent, so it stays worth reading.

Turn one on

Section titled “Turn one on”

  1. Open your app in Build.

  2. Select Automations in the tool strip under the preview. If you cannot see it, scroll the strip sideways, since it holds a fair number of tools now.

  3. Choose what should happen.

  4. Fill in the blanks it asks for. For the email automation that is which list to watch and where to send the message; for the daily summary you also pick the hour.

  5. Select Turn it on.

Your automation appears in the list underneath, and starts working immediately.

Pause, resume or remove

Section titled “Pause, resume or remove”

Every automation you have made is listed under the template picker, with how many times it has run.

  • Pause stops it running without deleting it. Resume whenever you like.
  • Remove deletes it. You can always add it again from the template.

What time the daily summary arrives

Section titled “What time the daily summary arrives”

The hour you pick is your workspace’s local time, using the timezone set on the workspace. If no timezone is set, the hour is UTC, so set one first if that matters to you.

What you need

Section titled “What you need”

The list your automation watches has to belong to a project. Apps built in Onplana Maker always do, so this only comes up if you are working with a list created outside a project.

You also need permission to publish the app. If you can publish it, you can automate it.

How often it can run

Section titled “How often it can run”

Automations are subject to a fair-use limit, so an app receiving an unusual burst of submissions will not send an unbounded number of emails. The limits scale with your plan and are set well above what a normal app does, so you are unlikely to meet them.

Section titled “Related”