Filters can be used to narrow the time that your Zap sends data to the action. There are two important factors to consider first:
- How the Trigger app provides date/time info. Depending on the format, we may not be able to filter by day and/or time.
- If you set up a Zap to do this, any tasks that come through outside the time set by your filters will never be sent to the action.
Filtering for Days
If your Trigger data includes the day of the week in any of the fields, you can have your Zap only Trigger on certain days. For example, here is how Gmail passes along the date and time:
Since days of the week are present, they can be used in the filter. If a Zap were being set up to only Trigger on Fridays, the filter would look like this:
The "contains" condition is used because there will be other date/timestamp information coming from the field, The "exactly matches" condition would prevent the data from passing the filter conditions in this scenario.
To have your Zap only trigger on weekdays, the filters would look like this:
"AND" are used because both filters need to be true in order for the Zap to not Trigger on weekends. Using an "OR" filter would trigger the Zap all 7 days of the week because one filter condition would always be true, and therefore allow the Zap to continue to the next step.
Filtering Between Certain Dates and Times
If your Trigger sends along a date and time field, you can use the "After Date/Time" and "Before Date/Time" filters to specify a date and time range. The tricky part to remember is that the Date/Time filter is going to look for a full date and time - you can't specify one or the other.
In this example, the Zap will only continue to the next step if the Trigger was updated between 2015-08-15 3:00 AM and 2015-08-25 7:00 AM.
Comparing to Today's Date
If you wanted to check out a "Due Date' that is being passed from a trigger, and only wanted a Zap to fire when that date matches today's date, you can use the Filter action to accomplish this.
First, you will want to generate a timestamp for today to be used in comparison in the following steps. Using our Dynamic Time Modification options, generating this timestamp is simple:
This would take in the long form time and date from our Zap Meta Human Now modification and output a simple MM/DD/YY set to today's date. We'll then combine this with another Formatter step to compare the input date from the trigger (our task's due date in this example) to this new, standardized date.
Using the Spreadsheet-like Formula formatter step, we can do a simple IF/THEN-like comparison of the date that we generated above, relative to the due date of the trigger we want to match:
Finally, we add a filter step that checks the output of that formula for it's true or false value. If the output is true that means that the input date matches today's date and we do want the Zap to continue running:
