The goal of this short topic is to show that while automations can be used to automate (simple) data processing and business process/rules, they can also be used for app debugging.
From my experience, many long-lasting bugs in a Tulip app manifest themselves by an incorrect value inserted in a table at some point. Sometimes, it’s very hard to reproduce them because the conditions to do so are quite specific/obscure, which can be made even worse if the app wasn’t well built.
Here is what I suggest:
- Create an automation that reacts to records being added/updated in the table.
- Examine the record’s values to find out if something is wrong.
- If so, trigger a notification (e.g. send an e-mail) to the person responsible for app maintenance with relevant information if needed (and/or log anything useful in a debugging table).
- Quickly contact the person who used the app and ask that person what exactly they were doing.
This technique has the following advantages:
- You can quickly get information from final users to know how to reproduce the bug.
- No matter which app triggered the issue, you will be warned.
- This will potentially reduce the time you spend debugging manually.
- This can notably help if you are in a situation where rebuilding the app from scratch is too costly (in time or money) and manual debugging has failed so far.
Note that this doesn’t depend on a specific Tulip plan since record-triggered automations are available in all of them.