Can't Get Substitutions to Work in Auto Actions

I just watched the Auto Actions 1 tutorial and am trying to get substitutions working as shown in the tutorial - ie. when a user logs in, I want an email to be sent to myself with the user's username.

I tried including [username] in the subject and body of the html emails, as shown by Nant in the tutorial. The emails were sent but the substitution wasn't included in the email subject or body. I also tried using [cb:userdata field="username" /] but this made no difference.

I also tried setting the Content Plugins parameter to Yes, but this didn't work.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Sending an email on every login is probably going to be a lot of spam, but it should be doable with the below for example.

Global
Triggers: onAfterLogin
User: Automatic
Access: Everybody
Action
To: YOUR_EMAIL_ADDRESS_HERE
Subject: A user has logged in
Body: [username] has logged in

You shouldn't need any further advanced parameters beyond this. So reload user doesn't need to be enabled, reference variables don't need to be set, leave format functions off, and you don't need content prepare.

Thanks Kyle, I used onAfterUserLoginSuccess as the trigger and seems the substitution didn't work for this trigger.

When I tried it with the other trigger, ie. onAfterLogin - the substitution worked.

As you said in another thread, "you don't need to be a programmer" to work Auto Actions but without insight into the workings of the triggers, it'd be pretty hard to work out why one trigger works with substitutions and another one doesn't.

Thanks Kyle, I used onAfterUserLoginSuccess as the trigger and seems the substitution didn't work for this trigger.

That trigger doesn't provide a user object so to use that one you need to set User parameter to User so substitutions will be from the user who just logged in.

As you said in another thread, "you don't need to be a programmer" to work Auto Actions but without insight into the workings of the triggers, it'd be pretty hard to work out why one trigger works with substitutions and another one doesn't.

You only need to know a triggers variables and hopefully that will make things clear enough. We'll be working on better documentation for triggers themselves, what variables they have, what they do and when, etc.. For now we have the below though, but it doesn't have the newer triggers listed.

www.joomlapolis.com/documentation/279-community-builder/tutorials/18358-using-cb-triggers

If you're ever unsure of what trigger to use then please do ask as we're here to help.