Auto Actions Behavior

Heya!

I'm slowly making progress on my project here. What I need to do with Auto actions is when someone checks a box that states they have their "certification" for CPR or First Aid training, it automatically begins counting down to an annual "expiration" date, and sends them emails a couple of weeks before expiry, the week of expiry, two days, one day, then "Expired".

The goal is to keep the user engaged so that they are able to stay current within their licensing. They're looking after kids, after all.

How would I use Auto Actions to accomplish this?

Thanks!

CB Auto Actions does not have a scheduler. So it's really not ideal for what you're trying to do. If you still want to give it a shot it's a very complicated process. You'd need a means of keeping track of the date they checked that box., which could be an auto action acting on the after user update trigger to save current date in the database (e.g. to a datetime field using field action).

Next you'd need an auto action that emails them, but you'd need it to check against that date you just stored to determine if they're at the interval which should be emailed; for that you can probably use a Code condition which lets you supply custom PHP as a condition for an auto action. You'd need to do your datetime comparisons here to see if the datetime stored for them is within an interval to be emailed.

Next you'd need to make sure this runs against every user on your site every day. To do this use the Internal Users trigger. Now you'll need a CRON task to run the Internal Users URL found within CB Auto Actions > Parameters every day. This can be a heavy operation, but it has batch processing built in so you may need the CRON to run this URL multiple times per day.

I don't honestly recommend trying to force CB Auto Actions to be a scheduler. It may have such functionality eventually, but its original intend was to perform automated actions on CB triggers and not for scheduling things like this. This would be significantly easier to do with CBSubs where they'd just subscribe to a plan (could be free) and CBSubs Mailer would have no issues handling those emails.

The need for the timer would be to remind them to re-up certain features for their licensure such as CPR certificates and whatnot.

Bummer, that would be a nice thing to have in this instance.