PIPELINE CAUTION! Renaming fields will break your pipeline!

Question

Well, I discovered which I believe to be a terrible flaw with Pipelines, though maybe someone here will tell me it is as expected everyone knows this and I am just late to the party.

If you use a field in a Pipeline, and that field is used in a condition, or is used to set another field (ie if you drag and drop that field to set another field equal to in during an update phase), and you change the name of the field, the Pipeline will cease working.

Now, it will not immediately cease working. It will continue to work UNTIL you go into the pipeline and refresh schemas or refresh page. At that point, it will recognize that the field name has changed in the 'fields to use' box, but will not recognize the name change in any of your conditions. Hence, all conditions and uses of that field in the pipeline will no longer work.

I think is is devastating, because I have no idea if I have changed the name of a field and if I ever open that Pipeline again it will break.

I tested in numerous ways to be sure I wasn't mistaken. Just a word of caution to everyone.

Do others think this is of course expected? Or also see this is a huge oversight?

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Mike Tamoush
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austink · Answer

There are a lot of really weird bugs with Pipelines that they need to fix.

I have had them give an error one day but then appear to recover and keep working. Only to find out a few weeks later that that error was the death knell of that pipeline and it actually quit working on that day but without any subsequent errors. They are just a nightmare to fix once something goes wrong. Usually what seems to cause issues is either refreshing the schema or NOT refreshing the schema at the right times.

At one point we had many processes in there but have moved the most critical ones to Workato or similar services as those have worked significantly better for us. I feel like we can trust that they will fire and work when they are set to but I do not have the same faith in Pipelines.

michaeltamoush · Answer

I agree with you on all accounts, which is why I am SHOCKED they are phasing out automations. With the difficulties and bugs in Pipelines, this just seems like they are completely jumping the gun. It will take longer than 18 months for them to sort out the myriad of issues in Pipelines and have it be usable.

I said it in some of my other posts, it feels like QB got new management 12 months ago and decided, let's stop listening to the users and do what we want. I want to keep giving them due credit, because I can see their vision and direction and I am on board - but they keep forcing everyone into their vision before it is ready and tested. The new reports are also riddled with bugs, and they've forced that on everyone as well.

I've only been using QB for about 1.5 years, and the first 12 months I was their biggest fan. The last 6 months, I'm the exact opposite, dreading that I got into a platform that I shouldn't have.

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Mike Tamoush
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markshnier__you · Answer

I plan to&nbsp; not really think about converting my clients until say after the September release when the conversion tool "matures" to cover more use cases and when I would hope that field name problem will be fixed.------------------------------Mark Shnier (YQC)Quick Base Solution ProviderYour Quick Base Coachhttp://QuickBaseCoach.commark.shnier@gmail.com------------------------------

michaeltamoush · Answer

FYI Customer Support was able to recreate the issue and have escalated to their Pipelines team. I'll update if I hear more.For now, i would avoid renaming any fields! Also, lets start a user voice to keep automations until Pipelines is a solid alternative?!------------------------------Mike Tamoush------------------------------

austink · Answer

I have a feeling that the decision to remove automations in favor of Pipelines is fueled by money in the end. I hope I am wrong but to me it seems like alternatives are being removed and we are being left with only one option. Right now all internal pipelines are free but that may not be the case forever. Once automations are gone they may decide to make part of the internal functions use step runs again and then you are locked into paying more for the tool that used to have a free option.At one point I thought the ability to use Pipelines was based on your selected plan but that appears to be changed now. Maybe I am misremembering this and it was only extra step runs that higher tier plans give you.

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PIPELINE CAUTION! Renaming fields will break your pipeline!