Order of Butler Actions
Asked by Eric Atwood:

I have a Trello board set up to manage our company workflow. The cards represent projects and the lists are steps in the workflow process. Each time a card is moved to the next step (list) someone new is responsible for the card and it receives a new deadline.

The way I have the Butler actions set up is when a card is moved out of a list it removes all members and due dates. When it moves into a list it adds members and sets a new due date based on the list it is moved into.

This works well most of the time but occaisionaly when a card is moved into a new list, the "add member" and "set due date" actions will run before the "remove members" and "remove due dates" action. So the members and due dates get added but are immediately removed from the card. This only happens on 2 of the lists and I cannot figure out why.

Any help would be appreciated.


Answers:
author: Vongsawat
body: Esme's solution for a single rule that removes then adds is probably your best bet.  

But if there is a reason you want to keep them separate (for instance some rules are doing additional list-specific actions). Then you could modify the rule triggers so that you never risk having them happen in the wrong sequence.  

Add a specific label at the end of the Moved Out Of list X rule.  

And change the trigger of Moved In To list Y, to trigger instead on when the specific label is added to a card in list Y.


author: Esme Crutchley
body: Hi [@Eric Atwood](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4015824)

Welcome to the Community!

Could you upload screenshots of the rule/s so that we can have a look and see if it can be altered to give the results that you want?

By the sound of it, it only needs to be 1 rule per card move (not a rule for OUT and another for IN) - when the card is moved into XYZ list, remove then add. But if you could send that, we should be able to see where we can help!

If you have separate rules based on where the card is moved INTO - this would make the most sense, but that's just me! If you could upload them, that would be awesome!

Esme :)


author: Bill Weaver
body: While having 1 rule to do all would be easier and neater, you also run the risk of exceeding the max number of commands per rule. I believe that is 20 commands? i run into this myself, and do something similar where a card is moved into the board, or to a new column on the board, activates adding checklists, assigning items to those checklists, adding calculated due dates for those items, based off a certain custom date field=, adding users, etc... I had to break this down into several rules. Sometimes it fires in the right order and works great, other times, the wrong rule is fired, then the next, all out of order. I fully understand Eric's question. I am going to try Vongswat's proposed solution to see if it works in my case.

comments: author: Vongsawat
body: If your commands are too long, you can chain together multiple rules by using a number of labels to trigger them in order.  

The first rule can trigger when something gets added to List A as normal. But the last action it does is add a label "processing_1".  

The second rule then triggers when "processing_1" is added to a card. Perhaps only if its added in List A to ensure no accidental triggers.  

With further rules and the last one clearing the triggers.  

You can also maybe add a general "processing" label in the first rule, then have all secondary rules and beyond also only trigger if the card has the general "processing" label. That way someone would have to fuck up twice by applying both labels for it to trigger etc.  

Hope it works out.


author: milynnus
body: [@Eric Atwood](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/4015824) without the benefit of a debug tool it would be difficult to tell. Moving in or out of a list involves change in the list_id on the cards and the way I observed in other custom built triggers and they (btw) use the same data from Trello server. So if I set up Triggers on two list, they are two separate independent processes and gets triggered in the wrong sequence. If that dependency needs to be enforced strictly, I would have 1 trigger since the 'out' for the first list will 'in' and have the change made in that order.

<https://youtu.be/N5RYSr54Ajg>

In the demo video, I am watching Singapore (List) with so I can offer 'Welcome to Singapore' video, but the same trigger is activated when airlines flies out of Singapore and I have to filter them out. This demo, I have triggers set to observe any change on the board, change for Singapore as a List, and any change on Singapore Airlines (as a card). So a lot of triggers are taking place when you have Singapore Airlines flying in Singapore. Enjoy the demo. :)


Tags: butler