Hi all,
Thanks for taking your time to read my question.
What I want to achieve:
I want to be able to trigger an action when a specific link is clicked in a record where there are several links. And in general what I want is to be able to trigger actions when calling or sending an email.
So I want to be able to trigger a specific action when the call calculation field is clicked (for example to log it). And I want the same for the email calculation field.
But I don’t want the action coming after the call calculation field is clicked being triggered because the mailing calculation field was clicked.
What I tried:
Currently I am a bit blocked regarding the filter or discrimination of these links in the same record (same record different calculation fields).
I tried to use the when a weblink is clicked action but couldn’t find a way to properly discriminate when the calling calculation field is clicked vs when the mailing calculation field is clicked. Currently it seems that if any of these are clicked then the action will be triggered.
It seems to me like a pretty basic use case that might have been solved somehow by some of you before.
So please, I would greatly appreciate some guidance regarding this.
Each workflow that triggers when a link is clicked produces its own link for each record in the app where that automation lives. You can access the links via the automation.
Back in a “certain other platform”, I could use base64 to formulate the link to each individual workflow and not have to store the actual links. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case in Tape. So in Tape, what we’re doing is firing a workflow when a record is created to generate all of the external weblinks required and store them in different “always hidden” fields. If you have a LOT of these links and don’t want to waste a field for each link, another option would be to create a JSON object of all the links with your own keys, store the formulated JSON in a hidden multi text field, and then the calculation field should be capable of putting together a set of buttons, each button corresponding to its own link.
I hope that helps. Short answer, each action requires its own link, and you need that link stored in the record in some fashion because there’s no other way to get to it when you need it.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks a lot for taking the time to go through this and for your amazing explanation. Because of your explanation I just realized that I previously had totally misunderstood the web link clicked trigger.
Let me restate my original goal and the 3 solution paths I was exploring.
Goal: being able to use an “on-click event” as a trigger for the phone numbers and emails.
Why: because it would be very useful to be able to trigger an action to register each outgoing call or email on a log.
Solution 1 → Phone and Email fields:
While it would be amazing I couldn’t find how to use these directly as a trigger. This would be the ideal and simplest solution.
Solution 2 → Calculation fields:
I then thought about setting some calculation fields using the phone and email to create these mailto and tel links. I was thinking that web link click action was meant for any link on a record thus my questions about filtering the links in the action. Now that this is out of the way (the web link click trigger doesn’t do this) I don’t know how to set on-click events as triggers for these calcultation fields.
Solution 3 → Web link clicked trigger:
I actually am almost there with that one. But I feel that this one is quite ugly both because the lots of workflows we have to do and because the final layout is a cold link that says nothing (compared to a nice styled link in calculation field). Also in the best case scenario this is two clicks instead of one (efficiency obsession mode on).
Here I set some “create a web link” when a record is created then update this same record with the links. Then these links call other automations using the web link clicked triggers where I displayed a message on a web page displaying the link with the mailto and tel type of link.
I found some problems that I don’t know if are bugs or simple misconfiguration on my side (it might rather be the latter): some difficulties to display the mailto/tel link correctly (using a calc or script action to build it before), a problem where even if set to never expire I got only the chance to click it once on record creation and from PC (this same link from mobile or PC again is not running, not even failing just not working). I stopped here, mainly also because the result as mentioned initially is a bit ugly.
I may have missed lots more things so I would be more than happy with anyone’s input for a workaround.
Thanks a lot Andrew and all for your time and help.
P.S. Also, I am really curious on how are you guys solving this “basic” problem to simply log properly outgoing communications. I feel like I might be missing something basic.
Hi all,
I finally arrived to a solution that is quite satisfactory combining solutions 2 and 3.
Thank you very much @andrew.cranston for your clarifying input that helped me to correctly understand web link actions and triggers. And thanks all for reading and thinking about this.
P.S. Even if this could be a partial solution, it has its downsides and it would be much desirable to be able to choose on click events as triggers (or similar behaviour, I guess server-side execution…).
