Send email to the individual that was changed

Hi guys,

I have a user-case that should be quite useful:

In a form I have field “Responsible” for an activity. Let’s say James is the responsible.
But I want to change the responsible from James to George, and want to notify both by email of the change.
Sending email to George is easy since its the new one on the form.

But how do I automaticaly email James?

It kind of reminds me some trick of creating an “ex Responsible” field and filling it with Record Rules, but I am confused on how to do that, if ever it is how to do it.

Thanks for any help!

As you say sending the email on form submit to George as the new person responsible is straightforward.

However, even if you had a “ex responsible” field it couldn’t be populated with James as the record rule runs after the record had been updated.
You’ll just end up with George in both fields.

I don’t think there is an easy native solution to this as updating a field looses the previous data.

To be honest, I’d probably use Make (formerly Integromat) to do this.

You could have a new field for the new responsible person, send a webhook to Make on submission and then pick up the account details for the email addresses from both to send the email. Then update the responsible field from the new field and clear the new field.

You wouldn’t keep a record of who the previous person was but they would at least be notified.

Otherwise you may need to look at having a related object tracking the changes for who is responsible so you have a history.

Either way it’s likely a Make scenario or custom code.

I may be completely wrong and missing something and I’d be very happy to be corrected if others have a Knack solution.

1 Like

Interesting. It’ is a solution. Tks Carl.

Anybody has a native Knack solution?

It should be a quite comon user-case.

I thought I would try and answer this, my first attempt so here goes.

Try populating two names and email addresses when you initially input the name (the second one using a Record Rule). Edit Name1 and Name1Email and you have both names to send to, you would then want to do a Submit rule, test if Name1 has changed, if so drop into a new child page create a blank “FinishingUp” Form updating the record you just amended, Using Record Rules make Name2=Name1 and Name2email = Name1Email and you are back to both names and emails the same.

I also use this snippet of JavaScript that autosubmits the form, change 000 to the scene in the Child Page.:

$(document).on(‘knack-scene-render.scene_000’, function(event, scene) {
$(‘button[type=submit]’).submit();
});

Give it a go and let me know.

Interesting @JohnG . I will try it and tell you. tks!