Can I make an embedded views listing of unrelated entities aware of the currently viewed entity?

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1

I want to trigger an automation in a collection field or embedded view in a displayed Page entity, but these entities are not related to the viewed entity. Can I still make these entities or the view somehow aware of the currently viewed Page entity, in order to click on their automation button to interact with this currently viewed Page?

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There is unfortunately no concept of “viewer context” nor in fact any concept of “UI” or Views at all, available to Automations.

Related: Can scripts be automatically triggered by events? - #5 by Matt_Blais

This is a good candidate for a feature request - something similar to args.currentUser - maybe args.currentView and args.currentEntity.

I would personally find it quite valuable if such a feature applied to Rules as well as Buttons, since I often use Checkboxes instead of Buttons to trigger Automations.

Currently there is the “Fibery Ghost :ghost:” fake User that gets associated with system-triggered Rules; there could be an equivalent “Ghost” or “background” View associated with a Rule’s “trigger context” when it is not triggered from a manual UI action, or there is no “entity context”.

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3

Indeed. Automations are basically ‘backend’. They don’t know (or care) what any given user was doing/looking at when they were triggered. In fact, there can be situations where no-one is actually using Fibery when they get triggered (e.g. scheduled automations, automations that trigger on a formula field which has been recalculated because the value of Today() has changed
)

I don’t think Fibery will reach the point where an automation can distinguish that a field change was triggered when a user drag’n’dropped an entity between columns in a board view vs the user changing the value via updating a cell in table view.

Similarly, I don’t think that Fibery will support automations that distinguish activity on an embedded view vs any other view.

Of course, never say never!

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4

Curious, why do you use checkboxes instead of buttons?

5

Buttons cannot be “clicked” by a script, but Checkbox fields can.

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