Find records, update triggering record
Dan Leeman
As it stands, when you use "find records," you can only update those records and not the triggering record with the data from the find records step.
Example: You want to assign ownership of a lead based on territory assignments. The trigger is creation of a lead record. We find records from a "Territory" app based on the state/region of the triggering lead record. Currently you can only update the territory record, but this wouldn't make sense. We'd want to update the lead record and assign it to the user, where the user value came from the territory record we found.
Y
YES Integrations
Around a third of the automations we implement are two step, with the first step finding a record or set of records and adding a flag for the second automation, which exists only to re-find the original triggering record and update it with information from the second set of records. A convoluted way to run what could be a simple action.
Peter Novosel This upgrade would be a major improvement on implementation time, automation usage and complexity. Is there any update on the timeline for its arrival?
Peter Novosel
Dan Leeman You're absolutely right, we have a number of capabilities to add here. There are many use cases where you would want to use something that you find in the lookup to update the triggering record. In this first phase of capability you can only take action on the found records, which precludes updates to the triggering record (or other items in the chain of events for that matter) which you might want to update with your found data.
The ultimate intention is to allow use of any of the outputs of prior actions (or the trigger itself) to be inputs for subsequent actions. This will require additional functions or formulas that let you manipulate the returned data. For example, I might want to find a list of available consultants, format them as an array, and then update the linked record in the triggering record with that list.
I'm tracking all of these requirements, and we fully intend to continue expanding the capabilities of Find and related actions. I want to offer functions to manipulate arrays in a variety of ways right in-line to the field mapping.
I would love to hear more about use cases that you have in mind so that we can put together a plan to accommodate them as quickly as possible.
Rachel Dew
Peter Novosel:
Yes exactly
I would like the ability to be able to grab the values from the triggering record so that I can use the values later in the automation.
Desired Acceptance Criteria:
- Should be able to get or reference all fields, including formula fields from the triggering record
- Should be able to Set the values of new fields for new records based on the values of triggering record fields.
- Should be to use the triggering record date field to set the date fields for new records. Should also be able to add time to that value (example [Closed Date] + x days/months/years etc)