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Question

Actions vs pipelines Best Practice

  • November 11, 2022
  • 0 replies
  • 130 views
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I have not actually used QB Actions. But in looking, for simple tasks, this seems like it may be a good way to go. If I make an action, it won't interfere with all my pipelines running, and also allows me to clean up my Pipelines and only have necessary complicated ones.

Is there a reason to use or not use Actions vs Pipelines? What is the best practice?

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Mike Tamoush
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    MarkShnierYou
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    • MarkShnierYou
    • Quickbase Alumni
    • November 11, 2022
    If you are officially ask QuickBase about this they will probably say that their long-term vision is to have a single path for these automated functions and of course that is Pipelines. But my personal opinion is that an Action is just a Webhook with a pretty face on it. Nothing more. That is why they run wonderfully instantly.  I think there is zero chance that they would ever declare end of life on webhooks, so it seems unlikely they would ever declare end of life on Actions.  But that is just my semi informed opinion and of course I don't live inside the braintrust of QuickBase.  

    One disadvantage of Actions is that they can be a little obscure to find particularly when you are debugging because you have to check each separate table to see if there is an Action being triggered.  Also there may be a limit of 10 Actions per table.   With Automations at least you could go to one place and see all the Automations for that App.

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    Mark Shnier (Your Quickbase Coach)
    mark.shnier@gmail.com
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    Mark Shnier. Your Quickbase Coach
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      • BrianSeymour
      • Quickbase Alumni
      • November 14, 2022
      We started to migrate everything to Pipelines. You can filter Pipelines using your own custom tags or by Channel. e.g. Webhooks. This should also help dodge table limits.

      For us, this includes the "simple" tasks which may only have one step and may have historically been an Automation/Action/Webhook. This approach keeps things consistent and I imagine helps future proof the app since Automations are being deprecated. Speed, error and access control reporting seem to be improving as QB further develops Pipelines as well.

      I don't have any official info from QB, this is just our internal best practice.

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      Brian
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