Help with finding an activity amongst many...

Paul McClenaghan

Hi there, 

I'm wondering if anyone has a rock-solid way of finding a specific Pipedrive activity from a Zap or if there might be a bug stopping me from doing it?

The problem: there are activities being created across multiple deals which usually all share the same subject but I need to be able to pinpoint and find just one and then update it based on info from a previous Zap step. 

Since the Zap app doesn't allow me to pass in the deal ID associated with the activity (which would be a really useful upgrade!), all I've got to work with is the subject field and a few others like status and user. 

So I thought of one workaround which was to inject the deal ID into the subject field when creating the activity, which worked. But crucially, when I come to search for the subject with that ID in it finds a match but with a different ID for another deal. It shouldn't be finding anything other than the activity with the exact subject (that I know definitely exists in deal 794... see below).

To illustrate what's happening you can see the data in/out in the Zap run and then the activity it fails to find within Pipedrive:

I've double-checked things like done status and user ID but they check out. The deal is not lost either. So I'm at a loss now as to how to get this working. 

Perhaps there are some quirks to how this Zap app works that someone else has noticed or you can spot something really obvious that I've missed. 

Any help would be much appreciated!

Andreia Freixo

Hi Paul,

I tested this on my side and Zapier found the correct activity always, even when I had different activities with the same title and very similar numbers at the end (like in your case). Because I was unable to reproduce, I really cannot tell where the error might be. The only thing I can think of that might be interfering here is the fact that Zapier will also search by similar matches: https://sharing.pipedrive.com/Kex1ct

I would reach out to Zapier support as they surely have a bit more information on their side about how the search is done and how the automation is set up. Hopefully that will help!

Kind regards,
Andreia

Paul McClenaghan

Andreia Freixo said:

Hi Paul,

I tested this on my side and Zapier found the correct activity always, even when I had different activities with the same title and very similar numbers at the end (like in your case). Because I was unable to reproduce, I really cannot tell where the error might be. The only thing I can think of that might be interfering here is the fact that Zapier will also search by similar matches: https://sharing.pipedrive.com/Kex1ct

I would reach out to Zapier support as they surely have a bit more information on their side about how the search is done and how the automation is set up. Hopefully that will help!

Kind regards,
Andreia

Okay, thanks for trying that Andreia. I will reach out to Zapier as this is quite a big issue for us and it's changing the way we plan out new processes. For instance, I'm working on something new where because I know I can't rely on the zap to find the right activity I'm needing to add a new pipeline stage and work from that (e.g. if the deal has updated to stage X, do this). This isn't ideal as it just creates more visual clutter for the sales team. 

It seems like it would be useful to include another field for the deal ID or title in the find activity Zap step. We've already got deals with 20+ activities so having a way of filtering the find by deal seems logical to me. 

Anyway, thanks again for your help.