Hello, guys! I hope you all are well.
I found this automation too interesting and smart (Congrats to the creator) and so I decided to create it for me. Nevertheless I’ve realized that if there are two or more people with their birthdays match the current date, both of them will receive a message containing the first name of all birthday people. In other words, this script is not sending a message separately to each individual with only their first name. Could anyone help me to fix this, please?
Hi @fabiorocha,
In the message body, where you currently have “First Name”, that appears to be from the list of matching contacts (the symbol before the “First Name” text is for the Contacts app). Clear this and change it to “Repeat Item” (which will select the contat that is currently being processed by the repeat loop) – the same as you have in the “Send” action, and then tap on “Repeat Item” and select the “First Name” field of the repeat item.
Hope that this makes sense.
@Tony, you are completely right. Fortunately, I’ve realized that some hours before your post. But thank you so much for answering me.
Now I decided to optimize that automation by adding a count to show me the amount of birthday people found, and whether there are no ones, display a message after “otherwise”. But it’s not working yet. I really don’t know why what comes after "otherwise’ doesn’t run. If you can help me once more, I would thank you greatly.
Try moving your if outside the repeat and your repeat inside the if.
Otherwise is never reached because there isn’t a first contact to run on.
@sylumer, it has worked like a charm. Thank you so much.
Now it’s a pity because the command to send a WhatsApp message from iOS automations has stopped working since yesterday. I don’t know why. It returns the following message:
Could not run Send Message
There was a problem communicating with the app.
Maybe try a restart of the device and a force close and reopen of the third party app. Sometimes that can help with communications errors, but not always.
It also looks like the app had an update in the last couple of days so it could be a new bug.
@sylumer, yes, dear. I’ve followed all steps you suggested above, but no success. This issue has showed up after updating WhatsApp some days ago. Curiously, I’ve just updated it again a few minutes ago with the hope of they could have fixed this, but not. The error message only has changed to that below:
Take a look back through this topic for people discussing and working around the iMessage error for Whatsapp.
@sylumer, I’ve just realized what was causing that last issue. Today’s birthday person had three cellphone numbers stored in contacts, so probably at least one of them in fact had no iMessage associated to, despite I wasn’t using iMessage service to trigger the message. Now I can’t imagine how to address out this new problem. Do you know if there is a way to specify a cellphone number to send the message at the moment the automation is running? This same situation is going to happen so many other times because lots of contacts have more than one number.
You could have a separate lookup if you need to be specific where you maintain a list of birthday contact numbers.
You could add a step simply to choose the first number each time; hopefully the first would be the one you want to use.
@sylumer, thank you so much for the insight and clue. It has helped me a lot. I’m sorry for the delay on answering to this post.
Hello folks, getting the same error when I select the recipient as myself. Tried turning off iMessage, tried just using the phone number, tried saving my number as “Self” and fetching this contact via Get Contacts. The contact even shows a linked social profile for whatsapp. Scoured the internet but no error has been reported for this use case. Would be much appreciated if anyone has a resolution or can help me troubleshoot! Thank!
