Automated actions (easy)

This tutorial will demonstrate how an action taken in one service can trigger off a sequence of events which automate what would otherwise be mundane duplication tasks in other services.

The 'Extra Step' in this tutorial will give you a very good introduction into how the boolean connector can be used to ask questions before deciding what action to take in your workflow.

The imagined scenario here is that the first step in creating a new marketing project is initiated by creating a new Slack channel for this project. This kicks off a sequence of events:

1. A new project channel is created by someone in Slack

2. A new project board is auto-created in Trello (could be another project management tool, such as Asana)

3. A new project folder is auto-created in Dropbox

4. A renamed presentation template is automatically copied into the new project folder

The completed workflow looks like this:

The steps involved are:

1 - Setup the Slack trigger

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When creating the workflow choose Slack as the trigger and create a Slack Authentication.

Then set the Operation to On Slack Event and the Event as Channel created:

The workflow will then be triggered when you create a new channel:

2 - Create Trello project

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Create a Trello authentication. Set the Operation to Create new board:

You can pick up the name for the project board from the name given to the Slack channel using the $.steps.trigger.event.channel.name jsonpath.

When the workflow is triggered, you will see the new project board appear in Trello:

3 - Create a new Dropbox folder

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Create a Dropbox authentication using your login credentials.

Set the Operation as Create folder:

As with the Trello board, you can pick up the name for the project folder from the name given to the Slack channel using the $.steps.trigger.event.channel.name jsonpath.

Note, however, that we are using a trick here to append the project folder name to a top-level 'marketing' folder in Dropbox. We are leaving the 'Path' box as a String type and 'interpolating' the jsonpath by enclosing it in { }.

Thus the final folder path is /marketing/{$.steps.trigger.event.channel.name}

When the workflow is triggered, you will see the new project folder appear in Dropbox:

4 - Copy the presentation template

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The second Dropbox step assumes that you have some templates available in a 'marketing/templates' folder, and copies a renamed presentation template from there into the newly created project folder.

Set the Operation as Copy file/folder:

When the workflow is triggered, you will see the new presentation template appear in the new Dropbox project folder:

Extra step - checking the new project is marketing

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In the above example, it is likely that you will not wish for all new Slack channels to automatically create a Trello board and Dropbox folder.

In this case you can make use of our Text Helpers and Boolean Condition connectors to check if the new Slack channel contains 'marketing' in the name.

Your workflow will then look like this:

The text helper connector can use the Contains operation to check if the name of the Slack channel contains the word 'marketing':

It will return a true/false result which the boolean connector can then check for:

The actions on the True path will then only be activated if a channel which contains 'marketing' is created!