Automations and approvals

Automations let Foral work for you: you define an event (the trigger) and a sequence of actions that run on their own whenever that event happens. This page shows you how to design a flow and how to set up human approvals.

The automation designer

Open the Automations section in the sidebar and create a new automation from the create button. The designer is a drag-and-drop canvas: choose a trigger and then chain the steps together.

Give the automation a name in the header and use the Activate automation toggle to switch it on. New automations start out inactive, so activate yours when it is ready.

Choosing a trigger

The trigger is what starts the flow. Pick it from the palette, which is organised into categories (Forms, Drive, Calendar, Approvals and Administration). Among the available triggers:

• Form submitted — the most common one; you can filter by a specific form or react to Any form.
• Document uploaded, deleted or shared in Drive.
• Invitation, RSVP, update or cancellation of events in Calendar.
• New user created or an email quota warning.

Chaining actions

After the trigger, add steps to the canvas. There are three types:

• Action — does something: send a notification, create a task in a plan, or start an approval process.
• Condition — branches the flow according to a comparison (for example, routing down a different path when a value in the response goes over a threshold).
• Stop — ends the flow.

In the messages of your actions you can insert values from the trigger using curly braces, such as {{form.title}}, which are replaced with the real data when the flow runs.

Approval flows

One of the actions is Start approval process. Set the Approvers, the Message to show and, optionally, a Deadline (hours). The flow then pauses, waiting for a decision.

Approvers decide in sequence: each one is notified in turn, and the request only moves on once it has been approved. If someone rejects it, the flow follows the path defined for that case. Each request has a readable number (for example, #000001), and shows who submitted it, the Form answers and the Approvers list with the status of each one.

When deciding, a justification is mandatory. If a deadline is set, a request that is not decided in time automatically becomes Expired.

Tracking runs

Every time an automation runs, it is recorded in the Run history, with the status of each step (Success, Failed or skipped). That lets you audit what happened and re-run an execution that failed.