How many automation per table is too many?

Hi everyone,

Briefly (more details below): is there a limit in the number of automations that can be set up for one table (does it slow things down for example?) ?

In details, we are organising interventions of scientists in schools, and our main contacts in order to do that are “Captains” (leading scientists who will recruit around them other scientists) and teachers (who sign up their students up).
We have a dataset to organise all of the steps composed so far of about 30 different tables, 50 automations so far. There are still some improvements we would like to make, such as having a better and easier view of the interactions with have with our contacts, on one of the main tables that we have, the “events”.

We have a specific table where we store interactions, inputed by manual entries and automations acting upon contacts (it should also be inputed by emails via Make but this will for another topic).

The thing is, we also have buttons in the event table which are doing things like sending emails for example, but those do not input the interaction tables, and we would like them to.

I thought about several options, and I was wondering if the first one had any foreseen drawbacks :

  1. create an automation per button (using a column which will be modified when the button is pushed). It has the advantage that the interaction will be recorded instantly. But as there are already 20 buttons or actions that I would like to send information to the Interaction table, and there will probably be more of those. That would be total 50 automations on a big table. Is it too much?
  2. I do not think I can directly use the fact that each button in the event table would modifies rows in the interaction table, as for example there is a different date column for each button in the event table whereas there is only one in Interaction table and I need columns with the same exact name.
  3. I could create yet another table (the button table) where my buttons in the event table would send information of the row. Then I can get around probably by getting the latest date of the row to be added to the interaction table (and I can probably find something for the content as well).Then I do one big automation, a periodic one, as if I’m correct I can not run an immediate automation on a table entry which was entered through an automation or something else than a form? (not sure about this one but it seems to me there is a limit of that kind)

We’re using SeaTable cloud, and I welcome any suggestions.
Thanks!

The limitation may be 100 per base, which is large enough for your case. The number of automations will not slow down the base. The thing really matter is how often the automations are executed.

From my understanding, you table is like below:

You want to add buttons in the event table to add/modify rows Interactions automatically.

I’m correct I can not run an immediate automation on a table entry which was entered through an automation or something else than a form

You cannot run automation triggered by the result by another automation (it is for preventing loops). But forms can trigger automations.

You have proposed 3 ways to solve the problem. The solution depends on the details of your use case. If you need more information, just post your questions.