Welcome to the module on process automation with Appsheet. In this module, you will learn about the automation capabilities of Appsheet and how you can use them to automate business processes. We discussed the various features of Appsheet automation, how you can integrate with Apps Script and review automation monitoring. Let's do a walk-through of a simple use case to discuss how you can implement automation in your app. We use a sample employee onboarding app to implement and demonstrate AppSheet automation. When an app user creates a new employee record in the system, a confirmation email is sent to the human resources department of an organization. Let's review how you can use AppSheet automation to send the email. AppSheet might suggest automation bots in the editor based on the types of columns in the tables that are used by your app. If you choose to use the bots, AppSheet automatically creates the necessary automation components. If they meet your requirements, you can modify and use the components in your app. In this walk-through, you learn how to create and configure new automation components. To create a new task in the automation tasks tab, click new task, configure the task with the following settings. Select the send and email task category. Name the task. Select the type of email. The custom template email type is the default, which lets you configure emails with text, HTML, or variables from app data. Select the table that the task will execute against. Add the recipient's email address. To add additional recipients click "Add," and enter their email addresses. To customize the content of the email, enter values for the email subject, email body, and other fields as needed. To save the changes to the app, click "Save." Next, to run this task, create a process. From the automation processes tab, click "New Process." To configure the new process enter a process name, select the table for this process. Next, add steps to the process that are executed when the process runs. Click "Add a Step," enter a name for the step, click Create a "Custom Step," select "The Run a Task Step Type," and select the task that was created earlier. The selected tasks settings are displayed in the AppSheet editor on the right. Click "Save" to save your changes to the app. Next, to trigger a bot that executes the process, we define an event in the app. When the app is used to add a row to the employee table, this event should be triggered. To create and configure the event in the AppSheet editor, navigate to the automation events tab, and click "New Event." To configure the new event, enter a name for the event. For the event type, select "Data Change." Because we want the event to trigger a bot only when a new row is added to the table, select "Adds Only." For table, select "Employee." The data changes made to this table will trigger the event. Leave the remaining settings as the defaults, then click "Save." To connect the automation components, we use a bot. To create a bot, navigate to the automation bots tab, and click "New Bot." To configure the bot, enter a name for the bot, click "Create a Custom Bot." To configure the event that will trigger the bot, click "Configure Event," select the event that was created earlier. The settings panel on the right displays the event configuration. Click the arrow next to run this process then select the process that the bot will execute. Save the changes to the app. In this walk through, we created individual components separately within their respective tabs in the app sheet editor. The editor also lets you intuitively design all the components when you create the bot. You can configure the event, process, steps and tasks without switching between tabs to configure the individual components. To test the bot, navigate to the managed deploy tab in the AppSheet editor and run a deployment check. Resolve any errors and optionally any warnings that might be reported. Then to deploy the app, click "Move App to Deployed State." If the app is not deployed, bots will only deliver email to the app owner. Now, as part of the employee onboarding process, when a new employee record is created with the app, the new employee created event occurs, which triggers the employee on boarded bot. The bot runs the new employee process, which executes the Send Email task, and then email is sent to the recipient. AppSheet automatically substitutes the name of the employee in the email, subject and body from the new row in the employee table.
