I have a table with a user field. There are several records in that table. I want to create an email notification that will send an email to these users. The number of records and the values in this table can change dynamically. Is there a way to do that?
Question
How to send email notifications to multiple users from a report?
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+17Hi Surya,
So what you would like to do is set up a email notification that goes out to users from a report. Would it be that they should receive the full report whenever any record on it changes or would it just be that you want them to receive a notification on the specific record they are assigned to? It is possible to set up a notification to send a notification to users when a record they are assigned to via a user field to is changed so long as your company has enabled external emails, and when the notification is created it is set to Open. That would send a notification on those individual records (Or in the case of a Grid Edit or Import action a mass update email can be sent out as well but that needs to be set up as part of the notification process). Is that the functionality you are looking for Surya?
So what you would like to do is set up a email notification that goes out to users from a report. Would it be that they should receive the full report whenever any record on it changes or would it just be that you want them to receive a notification on the specific record they are assigned to? It is possible to set up a notification to send a notification to users when a record they are assigned to via a user field to is changed so long as your company has enabled external emails, and when the notification is created it is set to Open. That would send a notification on those individual records (Or in the case of a Grid Edit or Import action a mass update email can be sent out as well but that needs to be set up as part of the notification process). Is that the functionality you are looking for Surya?
Whenever there is a change on this record, the email should go out to the users on the report. Pretty much like the Watch feature on github. And all the email recipients are quickbase users. (No one on the www)
+17Hi Surya,
Excellent, I just wanted to confirm. In that instance you would just want to go into your settings for that table and from there you can set up a notification to go out to users based on a record being changed. That would work just like a normal notification. You would then just want to add the exact same filters to that notification as you add to your report. That way it is focused on only those records that also appear on that report. Once that is set up you can set the notification to go out to users listed in the field, under the To dropdown. So long as the user field is in that table it can be used as a target. You just want to make sure it is a user type field and that the filters on that notification match the filters on the report to keep it from notifying on all record changes. The trick will just be lining up the notification trigger conditions with your business needs.
Excellent, I just wanted to confirm. In that instance you would just want to go into your settings for that table and from there you can set up a notification to go out to users based on a record being changed. That would work just like a normal notification. You would then just want to add the exact same filters to that notification as you add to your report. That way it is focused on only those records that also appear on that report. Once that is set up you can set the notification to go out to users listed in the field, under the To dropdown. So long as the user field is in that table it can be used as a target. You just want to make sure it is a user type field and that the filters on that notification match the filters on the report to keep it from notifying on all record changes. The trick will just be lining up the notification trigger conditions with your business needs.
Evan...so far so good. But since there could be more than 1 (even more than 20) such people who may want to watch a given project, I would have to put them in a separate child table: "Watchers and the Watched". Since a project can be watched by multiple watchers and a watcher can watch multiple projects, this data has to reside in a many-to-many relationships table. Now, whenever a modification is done on any given project record, the email has to go out to all those who are watching this project (from the "Watchers and the Watched" table). Just like watching github repos, except this is Projects in QuickBase.
Surya,
There are two solutions.
1. On the report of Users to be Notified, make a formula URL button to update a a date/time field to now() and then set an email Notification to fire when that date changes. You would filer the report so that it would not include records which have had that date updated today. The UIRL button would also refresh the report, so basically, you would click each record to trigger the notifications and just keep mindlessly clicking until all the record where gone.
Once that is working, you can then make an Automation to do the same thing - update all those records. In my testing, the Automations run slow enough that they are all considered to be separate updates by Quick Base (and not a mass update) and the individual Notifications will fire. So you could trigger the Notifications by clicking on just one record to fire them all (ie by starting the Automation).
There are two solutions.
1. On the report of Users to be Notified, make a formula URL button to update a a date/time field to now() and then set an email Notification to fire when that date changes. You would filer the report so that it would not include records which have had that date updated today. The UIRL button would also refresh the report, so basically, you would click each record to trigger the notifications and just keep mindlessly clicking until all the record where gone.
Once that is working, you can then make an Automation to do the same thing - update all those records. In my testing, the Automations run slow enough that they are all considered to be separate updates by Quick Base (and not a mass update) and the individual Notifications will fire. So you could trigger the Notifications by clicking on just one record to fire them all (ie by starting the Automation).
Thanks Mark, for the ignition. I will take it from here. Now I think I have an idea of how to do this.
+17With the addition of the other table of Watchers I think Marks method would be a great way to trigger those notifications to those who are on the Watcher list.
I have to have and already have the "Watchers" and the "Watchers and the Watched" tables. It is putting it all together for email notifications that has become the challenge. However, even now, the email notification has to go out from the Child table to show what's changed in the Parent Projects table. Is there a way to mimic the native notification message format that basically uses a certain form and says "Field A changed from "blah-blah" to "blah-blah-blah". It also highlights the changed fields in red. But when the notification is going out from the child table, how do you show the changes in the Parent record?
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