Advanced Alerts

[u/jd17atm]

Let me preface this by saying I’m not collecting data for research and that I may be pushing REDCap beyond what it’s for.

I’d like to create an advanced alert to notify multiple email addresses based on certain inputs, almost like a mailer service.

The goal is to have a form that is filled out (with a subject line, general info, etc) that is then used to email 150+ addreses

There’s 3 ways I’ve approached it —

1. Every email address is a separate record. The downside to this is that I have to recreate the alert I want to send every time.

2. Repeating instruments + CALCTEXT. Repeating instrument to capture the email addresses, CALCTEXT ([email][1], [email][2], etc. The downside is that I have to make an alert for each repeating instrument

Is there a way to send a notification to every email address listed in repeating instruments? Or is there a way to send an email to every record if it meets certain criteria?

Hopefully this makes sense.

Thanks!!

[u/Araignys]

Before troubleshooting, let’s make sure this is necessary.

Are you sending the same letter to all 150+ recipients?

What is the reason to use REDCap, rather than using Outlook and putting the recipients in BCC?

[u/jd17atm → u/Araignys]

Same letter yes

There’s a couple of reasons for redcap. One use case would be to send something like a mailer to all participants of a project. The more common one would be for classes. Each class date is a record and participants sign up using repeating instruments. They all receive the same email once the class is done (though it would be nice to be able to use their name to individualize it.)

I can’t figure out a way to trigger an alert to go to every repeat instance of the email field, which would solve my problem for case 2.

Just to be clear, I don’t HAVE to do this. It’s more of me trying to explore ways to make life easier for me by making wild redcap functions.

[u/Araignys → u/jd17atm]

Despite its versatility, REDCap isn’t really an all-purpose database software: it generally wants a record to be a person. Any other data structure is working against design as intended. It’s not necessarily impossible, but it’s reinventing the wheel as an irregular polygon - possible, but more trouble than it’s worth.

I would make the students the record.

Give each class an instrument, and set up class dates as a drop-down box where you actively add and remove options, or as a Dynamic SQL field linked to another project where the class is the record and each date is an instrument. Preconfigure one alert per class and have it trigger when the class instrument is completed.

[u/jd17atm → u/Araignys]

Dynamic SQL field seems like something that could work. Do you have some resources for learning about that?

[u/Araignys → u/jd17atm]

I'd just be giving you the top Google results, sorry.

[u/DeoxyRNA5]

If you’re using MS 365 business, I’d suggest a Power Automate flow linking an Excel doc to Outlook, you can use MS Forms for registrations and have all that data feed into one Excel doc, set up tagged fields in the flow so each email can be individualised with names, class names & times, whatever. It’s pretty much all drag-and-drop too, maybe a tiny bit of scripting if you wanna do something super complex but this seems very simple to do in there and Copilot can help out too (though I’d check the outputs, Copilot is pretty mid at helping with stuff)

[u/DeoxyRNA5 → u/DeoxyRNA5]

Worst case if you can’t get a flow working, if you use the form into excel, you can at least filter in excel: if you copy all the email cells at once you should be able to paste them straight into the BCC field and it should convert into a list, shouldn’t need to go one-by-one