Maybe I’m missing something here, but in 2015 someone posted a feature request that was still not implemented as of 2023 (wild!):
I’ve just arrived at this exact issue trying to build useful and actionable email notifications for my app.
The use case is fairly basic:
Parent Object (Applications)
Child Object (Notes)
When someone submits a new Note form against an Application send an email to the Application owner to let them know.
The Parent Object has details such as “Customer Name” and “Application ID”. From what I can see these items can’t be accessed by an Email rule at the child level even though for some reason that Email rule can see some parameters from the parent object properties in the recipients fields.
How is anyone supposed to generate any useful and/or actionable emails if we can’t put the Application ID or Customer Name from the parent application into the Email being sent?
Maybe I’m missing something here, but I was very confused:
I have this same frustration, seems like something simple that Knack should have long implemented by now. It makes the email communications you can generate very hollow. I resulted in including a link in the email for the person to view more details by clicking the link which takes them directly to the details. This is a poor workaround. I also feel they should allow you to create template emails at a higher level within the app and then decide when and where they are triggered.
I understand your frustration here, so I would like to offer a workaround:
If you create a text formula field in the Notes table and pull the connected field values (Customer Name and Application ID) from the Applications table, you can then use those text formula fields in the email body to reference those field values from the connected table.
Yes text formulas work to a point. For things like emails we use a combination of text formulas and conditional rules.
This is a tad (a little) annoying as text formulas add complexity when you don’t need that when displaying data that is already connected. Ideally this would work like grids or details views if it’s connected you should be able to directly access it.
Text formulas are very useful in Knack for getting data from objects that aren’t directly accessible from the object you are in. Just be wary of cascading formulas.
Thanks for the work around. The first time I tried this before making this post the output from using a text formula was blank. Your solution and @CSWinnall comment about cascading formulas lead me to investigate the table connection. Looks like I had the formula cascading in the wrong direction so its output in emails was blank. I had my “table connection field” at the parent (Application), instead of child (Notes) level.
With the connection corrected, text formulas are rendering before the email workflow is triggered and so they’re being output correctly which is great.
For anyone wondering this article is a good read: “Which table to add your connections to”
Hopefully this will help someone else who comes across this issue.
