Can I Add/Receive Attachments in Notifications for Trello

[Derek Seidel]

I'm wondering if there is a way get attachments in an email notification. For example, I have a rule set up for when we have a card moved into a category, Trello sends out an email notification to a couple of email addresses. So, if I attach something to that card, it would be nice if the attachment would be sent along/within the notification email. Or if that email notification would link directly to the card, rather than the board.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks.

[Iain Dooley · Accepted solution]

@Derek Seidel You can't have Trello send card attachments via email, and the reason that the notification is linked to the board, rather than the card, is because you're watching the board or list, rather than watching the card. So the notification is at that level, rather than the card level. If you were watching the card and getting a notification about the card, then you would see that the notification would link to the card.

Can you give some background as to the workflow you're trying to achieve? There might be a better way.

[Derek Seidel]

Hi lain.

Thanks for the response. I guess what we are trying to achieve to less steps to get to an attachment, whether it's a Word doc, pdf, jpg, etc.

I work closely with an Account Manager and we use a Trello board as more of an internal "to-do" or status list. We have lists on our board for things like "In production", "Internal review", "With client" and "Done". I set up a rule in Butler so that any time something gets moved to the "Internal review" list, it sends a notification to the AM and myself to show that something is ready for our review, which is a great reminder. But we were wondering if there was a way to have an attachment come through on the notification, because the way it stands is that we click on the "open board" link and it opens the board, but then we still have to find the card and click on the card to get to the attachment. We were just seeing if there was a way to cut out some steps.

I'm not sure if this completely answers your question about the workflow, but if not let me know.

Thanks again.

[Iain Dooley]

@Derek Seidel Okay how are you generating that email notification? For example, instead of sending emails Butler could post a "@board" comment on the card which would give every member of the board a notification, with a link back to the card where you could open the attachments.

I'm not sure if you can get access to attachment data using the Butler power up to include the link in the notification email.

The following Trellinator code would post a board level notification with direct links to each of the attachments from the card:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/6f770088101f269bc33f35c97aea73ce

You can see more about Trellinator here:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Marketplace-Apps-articles/Introducing-Trellinator-Automate-Trello-with-Google-Apps-Script/ba-p/925271

[Derek Seidel]

@Iain Dooley I've been playing around a little bit more, but have been unsuccessful. You had mentioned that Butler could post a "@board" comment on the card which would give every member of the board a notification, with a link back to the card where you could open the attachments.

How would I do this? I think this could work.

Thank you for all your help.

[Katrin Anger]

@Derek Seidel 

You would have to use the variable {triggercardlink} to be directed back to the card trigger.

[Iain Dooley]

@Derek Seidel whenever a user (other than yourself) posts a comment "@board" to a card the notification will have a link back to the card.

There will be 2 issues with this method:

1) You will need to set up a separate "bot" account to add the power up, otherwise the user who installed Butler will not see the notifications

2) Email notifications are tricky in Trello: if they are read on any other device (web, Trello mobile app) then Trello will not send an email for that notification even if you've got it set to notify "instantly". So if your team uses email notifications at all, then the best thing to do is encourage them to *ONLY* view their notifications via email; that is, disable app notifications and never look in the notification centre in the web/desktop apps. This is really finicky though (I've tried it) and eventually I gravitated back to never using Email notifications because at least if people only ever use app notifications, they are less likely to miss something (and eventually I developed Benko Board to fix the problem of notifications in a more comprehensive fashion)

If you're on a paid Trello plan then you can actually use Butler to trigger an email notification without adding a comment. You could just do something like:

When a card is moved to list "{*}" send email to "user1@domain.com" with subject "Card moved to {wildcard1}" and body "You can see the card at {triggercardlink}"

The only trouble with sending this as an email rather than using the notification system is that there's no way to get a Trello user's email based on their username. You can store this as a "map" in a separate card, but retrieving that description and then using it to populate the description would, if I recall correctly, require you to do a for each loop in Butler in conjunction with the send email command which I don't think you'd be able to do with the power up (I can't test because I don't have a paid plan but Katrin may know if you can do this).

To extend my previous post, here is an example using Trellinator to email people directly based on a card with a list of emails to notify in the description (one address per line) on the same board where you have this workflow running:

https://gist.github.com/iaindooley/dee9e93886dd6c1a78b2cbc8192031d0

[Derek Seidel]

Thank you. I think the {triggercardlink} is actually what we are looking for. 

I appreciate your help.