Collections

A collection is a list of records that you, your team and your agents keep together. A content calendar is a good example. Each post is an item with a title, a channel and a publish date, and it moves from idea to published as people and agents work on it. You decide what each item holds and the stages it goes through, and rules can take care of the routine parts.

Items, fields and statuses

Each entry in a collection is an item, and the details it holds are its fields. You pick the fields when you create the collection and can add more later in its Settings. A field can hold text, long text, a number, an amount of money, a date, a date and time, one or several options from a list, a person in your workspace, links to items in another collection, a file, a web address, an email address, a phone number or a checkbox. Long text is written in Markdown.

One field is the item's title. It's what the item is called on a board, on the calendar and anywhere it's linked. The first text field starts out as the title, and you can pick another in Settings.

Every item also has a status. A new collection starts with To do, In progress and Done, and you can rename these, add your own and change their order. Each status belongs to one of three groups - to do, in progress or done - and reports and rules go by the group, so you can name your stages whatever suits you. A new item starts in the first To do status unless you choose another.

Once a field is saved, its type is fixed, and so is the collection a linked-items field points to. Removing a field deletes its values from every item. If a view, a rule or an item still uses a field or a status, Hania tells you what's using it and keeps it until nothing does.

A collection can have up to 100 fields and 50 statuses, and a choice field up to 200 options.

Working with items

Click an item to open it. You can change any field in place and save when you're ready. Each item shows who added it, whether that was you, a teammate, an agent, a rule, the Hania Assistant, a connected app or the API, and its History tab lists every change since.

Dates and times show in the workspace's timezone if one is set in Workspace settings, and otherwise in your own.

If someone else saves the same item while you're editing it, you won't overwrite their work by accident. Hania stops and asks whether to keep your changes on top of theirs or to use their version instead.

Moving an item to the trash also cancels anything its rules were still waiting to do. You can restore the item from the trash whenever you like, but the cancelled steps stay cancelled, and the item counts towards your plan's limits again.

Views

A collection opens on All items, a plain list. You can add other views to look at the same items another way:

• List - a table with one row per item.
• Board - a column for each status, or for each option of a choice field. Drag a card to another column to move it.
• Calendar - items laid out by one of their dates. Drag an item to another day to change its date. If the field has a time, the time stays the same.

Each view can have its own filters and sort order. The search box looks through text, web and email addresses, phone numbers and the names of options. It doesn't search numbers or dates, so use a view's filters for those.

Rules

Rules do routine work for you. Each one says when it should act, which items it applies to, and what to do.

• When. An item is added, a field changes (or changes to a particular value), a date arrives, a schedule comes round, or only when you run the rule yourself. A date rule can act on the date itself or a set time before or after it. Dates without a time count from midnight, and schedules follow the workspace's timezone. If the workspace has no timezone set, rules use UTC.
• Only for items where. Optional conditions, such as Channel is Blog. Leave them out and the rule applies to every item.
• Then. Up to ten steps, run one after another, each waiting for the one before it to succeed. A step can run one of your tools, start an agent, ask for approval, update the item, create a new item, or email people in your workspace.

After any step you can change the item depending on how it went: one set of changes if it worked, another if it failed, and another if Hania can't tell. A step that waits for approval can also have changes for when it's rejected.

Text in a step can include the item's own values. Write {{.Values.title}} and the item's title is filled in when the step runs. The changes you make after a step can also use what that step returned, with {{.Result}}.

You can use a value like this in any field, not just text. Type it straight into a text or number field. For other fields, such as a date or a choice, click Use a placeholder under the field first. Hania turns what comes out into the right kind of value, so a number becomes a number and an option's name picks that option. If it comes out empty, the field is cleared.

Turning rules on and off

A rule you make yourself is on as soon as you save it. A rule made by an agent, the Hania Assistant, a connected app or an API key starts off, and it's marked so you can look it over before you turn it on.

Rules act on what happens from now on. They don't go back over the items you already have. To apply a rule to items that already match, use Run now on the rule. It handles up to 1,000 items at a time, and if more are left you can run it again to carry on where it stopped.

Rules that wait for a date work a little differently. In place of Run now they have Schedule matching items, which books each matching item for its own date. Switching a date rule on doesn't schedule anything by itself, so Hania asks whether you want the items that already match scheduled too.

Each item goes through a rule once. If you want a rule to act on the same item every time it matches, turn on the option to run again for items it has already handled.

Changes that a rule makes never set off other rules, so two rules can't keep triggering each other. Editing a rule doesn't change steps it has already scheduled; those run as they were set up.

Turning a rule off, or deleting it, cancels anything it was waiting to do, such as a post scheduled for next week. Hania tells you how many steps that affects before you confirm, and turning the rule back on doesn't bring them back.

Keeping an eye on rules

Every item shows what its rule is doing: scheduled, needs approval, running, done or failed. Check by hand means Hania can't tell whether a step actually happened, for example whether a post went out before the connection dropped, so look before you run it again. To see what a step did and what it returned, open the item's Runs tab, or Recent runs on the collection's Rules tab.

When a step fails, what happens next depends on why. A clear refusal or bad input fails straight away. If the tool's connection is marked safe to repeat, Hania tries again a few times, up to five attempts in all. If your usage credit has run out, the step waits 15 minutes and tries again, and the wait doesn't count as an attempt. A step that was cut off by a restart is marked Check by hand and isn't run again.

Approvals

A rule can stop and wait for a person. That happens at an Ask for approval step, or at a tool step that's set to ask before it runs, either every time or only when the tool changes or deletes something. The request shows on the item and in the Review queue, where it counts towards the badge.

Approve it and the rule carries on within about a minute. Until then the item shows Approved, finishing…. Reject it, with a note if you like, and the step is cancelled and any changes you set up for a rejection are made. If nobody decides before the step was due to run, the request expires and the step is cancelled. A request with no due time, such as an Ask for approval step, waits until someone decides.

Only people decide. The Hania Assistant and connected apps can see what's waiting, but they can't approve or reject it. You can't decide a request you asked for yourself, so it shows as waiting for someone else. You can, though, approve an item you added.

Agents and collections

Agents only see the collections you share with them. In a collection's Settings, under Agents, give each agent Read or Write access. Read lets the agent look items up. Write also lets it add and change items, up to 50 changes in a single run. An agent can't delete an item outright: when it tries, a request to delete it waits for someone to approve. Agents don't use collections during phone calls.

An Autonomous Agent can also save the result of each run to a collection. On its Agent tab, turn on Save to a collection under Outputs, choose the collection, and say what goes in each field. {{.Output}} is the agent's final answer, {{.Agent}} is its name and {{.RunID}} identifies the run. The answer suits a text field best. A number, date or choice field only takes it when the answer is exactly that kind of value, and otherwise the output fails and the reason is kept with the run. You can also choose the status new items start in. The agent needs Write access to that collection, and the editor tells you if it doesn't have it yet.

Analytics

The Analytics tab gives you a quick picture of a collection. It shows how many items sit in each status, how many were added and how many reached Done over the last week, month, three months or year, how rule steps turned out, and who adds the most items. Pick a date field to see how many items are overdue. Number fields show their totals, and money fields show a total for each currency.

Who can do what

Everyone in the workspace can see its collections. Owners, Admins and Members can add and edit items, approve or reject requests, and run rules by hand. Owners and Admins set collections up, which means the fields, statuses, views, rules and which agents have access. See workspace roles. To work with collections from your own code, see the Collections API.

Your plan sets how many collections, items and rules a workspace can have. The Collections page shows how many collections you've used, and the Billing page lists all three under Plan limits.