Some other way to compare two custom fields?

[JR Halchak]

So I'm starting a new weightlifting plan and Trello to manage my programs in the past, but it was pretty clunky.  I got excited when I saw automation was built-in now and had finally played with it a bit.  Unfortunately I've hit a road block that seems to ruin my plan.

For the sake of providing an example, say I have two lists:

• Lifting Day - This contains a list of exercises for the day
• Done - This will keep all of the completed exercises I did

Each card has 4 custom number fields: Weight, MinReps, MaxReps, and Reps. As well as a checklist for each set. (These exercises have a working weight along with a rep range, the idea is you increase the reps every session until you hit the max consistently, then you add weight and start back at the minimum reps).

I have a rule that when a card is moved from Lifting Day to Done, it will mark it's due date today and set it to complete, then copy the card back to Lifting Day. This works great.

There's another rule when Lifting Day gets a card copied from Done, it will clear the due date, reset the checklist items, and increase Reps by 1. This also works great.

The problem is that the Reps will surpass the MaxReps eventually. It was difficult in that rule to attempt to fix this so I started another rule. It was something like (pseudo-butler):

When Reps is set on a card in Lifting Day to a value greater than {{%MaxReps}} then set Reps to {{%MinReps}} and increase Weight by 5

Much to my chagrin, it seems it's not possible to reference custom field values in those comparisons, or at least in the greater than one, even though they're both numbers.

I also hoped to add some calculations in the future if I need to "deload" (lower the weight by X%) but that feels less possible now too.

Using variables anywhere you want seems like a pretty necessary feature for being able to create really cool automation... but I'm wondering if there's some other way to achieve my goal?

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TLDR: Is there some way to set {{%CustomField1}} to {{%CustomField3}}'s value when {{%CustomField1}} is set to something greater than {{%CustomField2}}? It doesn't seem like it. If not, can I request it somewhere? And is there some alternative way I'm not thinking of?

[milynnus]

@JR Halchak 

You are right that Trello does not handle comparison. I used to have a set of routines that returns the results for simple arithmetics and comparison by sent the variables  and required operations to an endpoint. The other arithmetics it has are on dates. 

[JR Halchak]

@milynnus 

That makes me sad. Do you mean you created a hosted service somewhere to take the values and return new ones to use?  That sounds like a lot, but I'm a software engineer and it'd be less effort than developing my own app that's automated how I'd like this to be.

If that's what you mean, can you share anything about how the automation was setup in butler? How you passed the values to, and used the values returned from, the endpoint?

[milynnus]

@JR Halchak 

You are right. That's the approach I had taken. The downstream automation will watch a CF.

[Vongsawat]

Bit late to the party but. Perhaps you can use a workaround by using a 5th custom field purely for Calculation?

When you increase Reps by one, also set Calculation to {{%Reps}}-{{%MaxReps}}. Because while you can't do arithmetic in the comparison trigger, you can do it in the set command.

Then have a new rule of "When custom field Calculation is set to a number lower than 0, then set Reps to {{%MinReps}} and increase Weight by 5"