Automate attachments or links from Onedrive to row in sheet (or vice versa)

Tim Starkey
Tim Starkey ✭✭✭
inAdd Ons and Integrations

Context: (sorry its long!)

We are an small AEC firm with 100's of active site design projects. Each project wil have plans prepared by multiple disciplines. Each discipline may require multiple submittals to various agencies to obtain approval. To track all of this we have a submittal tracker sheet in Smartsheet for each project. However, the document managment is a little chaotic. Designers save pdf plans to a marginally organized submittal folder on our company network. Our plans coordinator process these files and upload to various agencies. They then save a copy into another slightly more organized network folder (write protected) for document management / archival. Then managers will copy the plans AGAIN into either our company file share system (a slightly upgraded FTP, or more likely one of their various personal file share systems (onedrive, dropbox, adobe, etc) so our clients can access them. (Fyi, our current ftp access requires a project name and password. This can be embedded in the link, which simplifies access, and allows clients to forward to contractors for access. Convenient, but has security concerns. Small risk since its redundant copies anyways.

We are in the process of opening our smartsheet projects to our clients for collaboration. I would like to integrate file managment as part of this so there is a single client interface for conversations, project schedule, status updates, and file access.

Solution will require plans ultimately end up in our write protected network archive folder, and in a client accessed smartsheet dashboard (either attachment or link is fine... prefer attachment to avoid permissions in other file sharing apps)

I see two main options

1. Designers attach the pdf directly to the row in submittal tracker. This sheet (via report) is in client dashboard. Collaborator uses the attached file to upload to agencies. We move our archive folder into onedrive biz. SOME automation copies the attachment to a onedrive folder structure based on project number, plan type, etc info in the row.

2. Keep doing what we are doing, except move our archive to onedrive biz. When the coordinator copies the files to the onedrive folder, SOME automation attaches new files to a sheet and updates cells based on folder it was found in.


Question (finally)

Is this feasible? What integrations am i looking for? Any other suggestions? Solutions with version control in smartsheet a bonus.

We have access to O365 and a company onedrive, bluebeam, and some staff have access to adobe creative cloud. We are on enterprise smartsheet and using control center to provision projects.

We are not using sharepoint and our IT will quit if we do... I've heard. We do not have data shuttle, or other premium apps.

Thanks!!

Tim

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Hey @Julie Fortney<\/a> <\/p>

I'll answer what I can and shout out to @Brian_Richardson<\/a> for back up. <\/p>

#1 Report Filters- To my knowledge there isn't a direct Report Filter update however I wondered if the column was a dropdown list - if so, Bridge can update dropdown lists and if the filter was set to select all it made me wonder if the filter would pick it up new selections. (Datashuttle also updates dropdown lists if this method works)<\/p>

#2 I've had problems with a slow sheet erroring out in Bridge. The sheet was massive and Bridge would time-out. Bridge did not help this sheet (it might have been too large for anything to help)<\/p>

#3 -I don't have any experience with Control Center, so sorry, I can't answer those questions<\/p>

My fav Bridge solutions?<\/p>

-Capturing Approver Names in approval workflows<\/p>

-Adding rows - same sheet, different sheets, Child rows to Parents, On a weekly cadence, Adding New rows of acquired data to a status update sheet which feeds into a dashboard report<\/p>

-Translating Employee Ideas from their native tongue to English<\/p>

-Checking FedEx Tracking Status on a sheet's worth of shipments<\/p>

I hope this helps<\/p>

Kelly<\/p>"},{"commentID":373322,"body":"

Hey @Julie Fortney<\/a> !<\/p>

  1. In general you cannot update reports with bridge or the API, you can only get report information and details. So unless you are able to come up with a different solution you may be out of luck. Although, if this is a control center program, you may be able to use \"Dynamic Reports\" which adds new sheets to reports every time a project is provisioned (and removes as projects are archived). <\/li>
  2. Maybe using JavaScript in bridge would help, hard to say. <\/li>
  3. Unfortunately not.. You can not programmatically retrieve a form link (Big functionality gap in my opinion). We have begged Smartsheet to dynamically update forms with control center. Also you can not update the contents of widgets in dashboards with bridge or the api.<\/li>
  4. You could definitely set up a solution to achieve this. It would involve using a summary sheet in your blueprint where the link to your template sheets is profile data on your summary sheet. From there you can get the sheet id for each project in bridge, loop through them and make updates.<\/li><\/ol>"},{"commentID":373373,"body":"

    @Kelly Moore<\/a> thanks for the shout out :-) but I'm not sure I can help more than what's already been posted. <\/p>

    @Julie Fortney<\/a> in general Bridge is an API tool. You can setup multi-branched workflows in Bridge with pre-set API calls and utilities. You can also do custom HTTP calls to any API that you have access to in the cloud. So anything you can do with API calls you can do with Bridge. It also, importantly, allows you to run Javascript code using the results of your API calls, and to trigger workflows on changes to Smartsheet content or on any other webhook that you can receive from other tools.<\/p>

    There's a fair amount of Smartsheet API methods that are prebuilt into Bridge, but not all of them. So if you're looking at the Bridge documentation for Smartsheet<\/a> integrations and not finding what you need, you can also look at the Smartsheet API documentation<\/a> to see if there's something there to help you out. If you find an API method to use that's not already pre-built as an integration, then you can use the Custom HTTP Call step to directly call the API. You just have to provide the Smartsheet API with an API token, which you can assign to yourself in your Personal Settings.<\/p>

    It looks like your specific questions were answered pretty comprehensively by Kelly and Samuel but here's my 2c:<\/p>

    1. Because you cannot adjust report filters using the Smartsheet API, you cannot do this with Bridge. Here's the Reports methods<\/a>. You might want to consider a workaround for the process of having reports hand-updated with new job numbers. Perhaps leverage a creation date or flag new items with a checkbox that's cleared once the conditions are met that would cause the project to fall back off the report? You can also explore the \"contact has any of current user\" filter to pick up specific jobs for the viewer?<\/li>
    2. You could definitely use Bridge to read one sheet on a schedule or trigger, perform calculations using Javascript or the included utilities, and post the results. It may be faster and more stable than a huge number of formulas in Smartsheet, but I'm not 100% sure it would be. I would probably first explore using Data Mesh, which is setup to do this in a much more friendly way. If you don't already use Data Mesh, it's basically a batch index\/match tool. <\/li>
    3. As Samuel said, there's no API for updating widgets on a dashboard or retrieving a form URL. Also, I tested copying a dashboard and sheet in a common folder, where the form link was embedded in the dash, and unfortunately it does not update the form link. Seems like a gap and would be a good enhancement request. You could potentially work around this by having a common sheet with the form to capture entries, have a dropdown in that form for the project name that you can keep updated with Bridge, do a lookup to the sheet ID that the entry should go to on a sheet that Bridge maintains, and then copy the form responses into the individual project sheets using Bridge. I know that's pretty roundabout.<\/li>
    4. As Samuel and Kelly said, you can push dropdown updates through Bridge, it works better than Data Shuttle. You wouldn't need to maintain a separate lookup sheet though, if you create a report that contains the dropdown columns across your various created sheets, and then read that report with Bridge, the return from the API includes the source sheet ID and column ID for each report row. You can then leverage that to point Bridge at the right columns across your sheets without having to maintain a separate lookup.<\/li><\/ol>

      At Iron Mountain we use Bridge for a variety of use cases, here's the most effective ones:<\/p>