Forum Discussion

KimG's avatar
KimG
Qrew Cadet
3 years ago

Automation turned itself off

Is there something which would cause an automation to turn itself off?

I built a new automation that adds X child records when a button is clicked, where "X" is number field on the parent record.  (I had posed a question last week on how to do this where it loops through the automation, counting down).   I had tested this, and it worked fine.  I put in quantities of 5-10 for testing.  It looped through the automation the correct number of times, a little slow, but no problem.

Today my colleague noticed it stopped working in the middle of adding records to a table.  In this case, "X" was set at 108.  It ran through 102 times creating 102 child records and then apparently the automation shut itself off.  I know this because when I looked at it today I could see the automation was off.  There are only two of us here with the admin rights to do this and neither of us did.  I can see the countdown quantity is now at 6.  

Is there some limit on the automation runs related to something?  That doesn't make sense because I can see the automation has run over 200 times in the last week and I'm sure other users are running much higher numbers for automations. 

Has anyone else run into this issue?  It does not show there were any errors.

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Kim G
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Quickbase Automations
  • MarkShnier__You's avatar
    MarkShnier__You
    Icon for Qrew Legend rankQrew Legend
    3 years ago
    But I cannot find any documentation on this I strongly suspect there is a limit of 100 loops in an automation triggering itself. They probably try to protect the automation from getting into an infinite loop.  The automation may have disabled itself although I would've thought it would have recorded an error. Do you see an error count in your list of automations?

    One idea would be to convert this to a Pipeline as it may have higher limits.

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    Mark Shnier (YQC)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    • KimG's avatar
      KimG
      Qrew Cadet
      3 years ago
      Hi Mark - no there was no error message showing in the "Error count last 7 days."  My colleague just noticed it eventually stopped counting down and then when he tried to use the button for other records it now longer worked.  I also thought it might be thinking it was in an infinite loop and therefore shut itself down. I would have also expected an error message though.  

      We'll probably just try running numbers less than 100 and doing it in two steps in the interim.  Not having to click the button 100 times is in itself a big improvement.  It is rather unusual that we would need to have the number that high.  Probably 75% of the time we only need one child record added, 20% of the time 2-10 child records, and only the last 5% that are bigger numbers.

      I do want and need to figure out Pipelines, I've attended a few trainings, but it just hasn't clicked enough for me to get my own to work.  (I haven't tried the "start migration" but I know that need to do so.)

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      Kim G
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