text field triggers do not fire on filed being cleared

Hi there, love text field triggers and can do some very useful things with them, particularly in helping to construct URLs against a standard naming convention based on user submitted data. There is one major flaw, however. The “when a field is changed” trigger does not fire when the field is cleared. Rules which rely on reformatting another field when any change is made to one of the fields rely on the change being able to be to delete the current input.

A specific example:

I have a field called page URL in a board which is used to make requests for new landing pages for new products. We construvt the URL based on a standard www.my-site/products/[product name] format but we also need to add a suffix sometimes for duplicate pages.

So I have two fields:

Product name (with hyphens)

URL suffix

And a rule which says if either are changed we update the page URL field to: www.mysite.com/products/product name (with hyphens) - URL suffix

This works great (with some checks to deal with either field being empty) but the problem is if someone deletes the suffix field because they realise it is not required, the rule does not fire. It doesn’t recognise a deletion of data as a change.

Notice someone else has mentioned this in the update comments here ref not working on ‘cleared’ - Introducing Text Field Triggers and Conditions! - #26 by Esteban_Giannini - I’ve voted as it would be good to get the rule to run when it is cleared - i’ve tried the rule and even if you ‘check if’ its empty, it doesn’t seem to run.

My only workaround would be to have another custom field that could trigger as ‘needs new URL’ or ‘URL not required’, but it would be great if this was a feature within the text trigger to capture any accidental deletions, or to prevent user error.

1 Like

Thanks Rebecca. Another point to note here is that when you reference an empty field in another text field, you get a [no content] element in the string. I understand why that’s there but it would actually be more useful if it rendered the empty string so that optional elements could be stacked in a string without breaking it. I have to work around this using checks for empty fields and then having a definition for the text that excludes teach empty field but it can get a bit clunky when you are concatenating a set of fields into a single string.