I am building a date reminder app where users can input a date, and then they will get an e-mail reminders as they get close to that date (think: Never forget your wedding anniversary again!).
I have all functionality built and final step missing is getting the e-mails to send. I understand I need to use a Make/Zapier integration to get the e-mails to fire, but the issue I am struggling with is how to AUTOMATE the email sending even when the user has not clicked anything. I essentially need to set up a task that runs on a daily basis and checks if any e-mail alerts needs to be sent.
First, let users choose a date first. This will come with a year, though, and I assume you donāt want the year part.
Add an arrayformula to calculate this yearās reminder. Extract the day and month of the original date, and append the current year. You might want to consider the 29th February case, though, since itās an outlier with this approach.
Every day, say at 7AM, run a Make scenario to loop through all your āreminderā rows. Check if any rows has a date that matches the current day in Make (make sure you have the correct format to check, i.e both sides must follow the same format).
I have steps 1 and 2 sorted already. Users add a date (including year) and I strip the year away and append current year and then current year +1 (in case we already passed their birthday this year), so once we move to 2023, the whole approach shifts by itself so all good on this one.
Any chance you can elaborate on the ārun a Make scenario to loop through all your reminder rowsā? Currently Iām hosting all the data inside Glideās data editor (as opposed to Google sheet). Do you propose I first move the data out to sit in Google Sheet? And then thereās a functionality in Make where I schedule it to sift through all the rows looking for e-mails to send, correct?
Yeah, thatās the plan. At the moment the āreadā query for Glide Tables only work for business plans upwards, so thatās why I advised you to move things to Google Sheets.
Gotcha. Iāve migrated my page into Google Sheet now (What a pain. Very surprised thereās not just a function to sync your existing Glide data tables into GS). I basically had to rebuilt the whole thing from scratch, and once you change the data source, even the front-end updates. OH well. Itās done now.
I will start exploring building the Make script. I hope itās okay I reach out in case I canāt figure out to do it. But at least it sounds like Iām on the right track now
Iāve been looking into the Make integration and Iām running into an issue:
The Make āwatchā integration watches the entire Google sheet workbook and not just a single column. So just adding a new birthday (a new row) triggers the watch integration and it includes all this irrelevant info. Do you have an idea how I can get around this issue?
I have some ideas for solution but they are all really complicated and involves building macros that just make the whole thing even more complicated.
For cases where you need it to be more frequent than once a day, please beware that each search counts against your quota, so donāt do it too frequently (say every minute), otherwise you will run out of your quota in no time.
