UPDATE: see below
I thought I’d post this as a (hopefully) useful trick for how you can use Fibery to generate/update entities and/or trigger notifications on a repeating schedule.
Examples of where this might be useful:
- You want to automatically update some data at repeating intervals
- You want to generate reminders on a regular schedule
- You want a ‘Meeting notes’ entity to be created each week (and you’re too lazy/forgetful to manually create one each time
)
This tip relies on creating a date field called Last run and then defining a formula to calculate a value that updates as time goes by:
With a constant date for Last run, the value of Time since last run increments by 1 every day.
Using an automation that triggers on changes to Time since last run it’s possible to make things happen according to the required schedule.
For example, if you want a notification every 7 days, this automation should work:
Note: the second action -
Update Last Run to Today() - is there to ‘reset the timer’ so that it will run again a week later, and a week after that, and so on…
To start the schedule running, you should manually set Last run to an appropriate value (e.g. today’s date if you want the first trigger in a week’s time).
You can even define a rule that sets the value when the entity is created if that is appropriate.
It is expected that some of this functionality (time-based triggers for automations) will eventually become natively available in Fibery, but if you can’t wait 'til then, I hope this is useful 