Forum Discussion

SaurabhRathi1's avatar
SaurabhRathi1
Qrew Member
5 years ago

Difference between Quickbase Action Vs Automation Vs Webhooks Vs Pipeline

Hi, I have query like what is the difference between Automation Vs Quickbase Action Vs Pipeline Vs Webhooks?? As I can see Quickbase Action provide the same thing that automation. We have cha...
Pipelines
Quickbase Automations
AustinK's avatar
AustinK
Qrew Commander
5 years ago
Actions are older and Automations replaced them. At this point automations are older too and Pipelines is trying to replace them. This is just the lifecycle of the product as it has grown. The reason they left Actions in is because many apps and workflows were built on Actions and if it was removed it would have caused a lot of issues for people.

Automations are more powerful than Actions in general. Pipelines is more powerful than either one but is still being developed and in my opinion is not ready for production use. You can do a lot more with Pipelines than with Actions or even Automations.

I can't even remember the last time I created an Action at this point. I only make automations. There are some Actions we still have in place that are older and continue to function. We just do not really make any new ones. Automations are better, again in my opinion, so I prefer to use them when needed. Maybe someone else can chime in if they actually still use Actions and explain what they use them for.

The final piece here are the webhooks you mentioned and those are not the same thing as automations. Automations do use webhooks to do many actions though. Same as Pipelines and possibly Actions, but I know Automations and Pipelines use it for sure. In a Pipeline you must explicitly create your webhook and tell it what to do. Automations just use them to do their magic behind the scenes.
  • JimHarrison's avatar
    JimHarrison
    Qrew Champion
    5 years ago
    I can add there is a difference in table/field permissions and what defines "Record Owner"/"Last modifed by" when a record is added/Modified using these features. This becomes important when Users start trying to figure out who changed the record.

    When an Automation is saved, the User who saved the Automation becomes the Owner of the Automation, this doesn't work if there is more than one person managing an App/Realm; like a team. If there is an error with the Automation, the last User who saved it gets the Notification of the error, so nobody else knows it's not working. As an aside it's the same problem with QB Connections, ever try to edit a Connection someone else has created? You can't.

    We don't use Pipelines or Actions.

    We prefer Webhooks as the permissions can be set to use a Service Account, meaning you don't have to find a creative way to include a User_Token in magic buttons or Code pages. The level of granularity over table permissions & field permissions can be sculpted in a manner to give the User a professional experience without granting everyone the Administrator Role. A Team can manage Webhooks and a Service Account gets the error Notifications, which can be an Alias group - so your Team gets the errors. Sadly the errors don't clear and there is no way to manually clear them, so if there was an error recently it looks like there is an error for a long time.

    Regards,
    Jim

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    Jim Harrison
    transparency = knowledge + understanding : The Scrum Dudes
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