Cool new feature in automations

Airtable silently rolled out a cool new feature in automations. You can now specify the “user who took the action”.

I think they meant to say the “user account that triggered the automation”. :wink:

But nonetheless, a very cool new feature! :slightly_smiling_face:

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It isn’t necessarily the person who triggered the automation. The person may not even realized he triggered the automation. He may have just changed a field value that updated a formula that triggered the automation.

I haven’t tested to see what happens with automations based on conditions of a formula with a time based formula like NOW() or TODAY(). But I generally avoid those formulas anyway.

I first found out about this feature here.

If they change a field that updates a formula that triggers the automation, their name would still show up as the user, correct? I guess we should test and find out!

Yup. At least that is what happened in the quick test that I did. It didn’t work when I was testing the automation, but it did work in the live automation.

So this is useful for far more than just interface buttons.

I have not tested if a “when record created” automation brings in who created the record, but I suspect that it should.

Yep, this is a very cool feature. And thank you for testing this! :slight_smile:

Interesting that it works with the live automation, but not during testing.

But this does seem to confirm that it is the person (i.e. user account) who triggered the automation — whether they realize they triggered it or not. Of course, the “person” could be any user account or service account that is linked to a Personal Access Token.

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Just tested with “when record created”. It works when I create the new record in an Airtable grid view. It does not work when I create a record using a form view, even when I have the form setup to identify who submitted the form. Maybe a bug.

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Wow, very interesting! Great job catching that! Yeah, it seems like that might be a bug.

I updated my original post above to say “user account” instead of “user”, which is what I originally meant. I think I confused @Kamille-Parks as well on yesterday’s podcast, because I was saying “user” instead of “user account” (which could also include a “service account”).