Forum Discussion

IvanWeiss's avatar
IvanWeiss
Qrew Captain
5 years ago

Setup "Tomorrow" in automation as next work day

Hi an automation which creates a bunch of new tasks that are X days in the future....  It is assigning them on weekends.  How do I set the automation to only create tasks with a due date X work  days ...
Formulas and functions
Quickbase Automations
UserVoice
JasonJohnson2's avatar
JasonJohnson2
Qrew Cadet
5 years ago
I work in project management so I live it daily.

I created a template of tasks and assigned days prior and post an install(event) date. I had a field designate the tasks are for template purposes in the task table and made my automation copy those. I have to have a relationship between the events and the tasks to get the event date or in your case it would be the project start date. Then I have in tasks the formula for the task due date which helps when the start date changes. Below is my 'some complicated' formula to offset the weekends. 

If([Days Prior]>0,WeekdayAdd([Event Date], -1*[Days Prior]),
If([Days Post]>0,WeekdayAdd([Event Date], [Days Post]),
[Event Date]))


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Jason Johnson
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  • IvanWeiss's avatar
    IvanWeiss
    Qrew Captain
    5 years ago
    That is what I was afraid of....  So based on this I take it no way to use that function in an automation and I need to rebuild this entire thing in a templates table?

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    Ivan Weiss
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    • EvanMartinez's avatar
      EvanMartinez
      Quickbase Staff
      5 years ago
      Hi Ivan,

      I just wanted to chime in and confirm that the suggested way would be to use a formula field to help you designate work days and to build your automations to pull from those templates. There isn't a functionality in Automations at this point to specify that you want to use Work Days versus weekends, that is something that relies on the logic available in a formula field to calculate. You would want to go with the types of solutions that Mark and Jason are suggesting to create a template table so that records can be populated with the right dates. 

      If being able to specify work days in your Automation workflow would be helpful though I would suggest putting that in as a User Voice request. The Quick Base User voice can most easily be accessed from the My Apps page in Quick Base by clicking on the orange Feedback tab that appears on the right of the page or at http://quickbase.uservoice.com by signing in with your Quick Base credentials. This way it is on the mind of our Product Team as they continue to look at how users are automating their workflows. Sorry there isn't a simpler path I could recommend to you and thank you for your time. 

      Also if you do make a User Voice request it can be helpful to post a link to that request here so other community members in the future with the same need can add their votes as well.

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      Evan Martinez
      Community Marketing Manager
      Quick Base
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