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What are best practices for avoiding cycles (aka loops or boomerang effect) in Zapier integrations?

For illustration purposes I’m going to share scenarios related to two task / issue tracking systems.

Scenario 1:

Status is changed on a ticket in in System B and needs to be propagated to System A. 

When the integration updates System A an update has occurred and might trigger a task that would update the original ticket in System B, resulting in a cycle.

This scenario seems to have a simple way to avoid the cycle, see that the status in System B already is the same as System A and don’t perform the update.

Scenario 2: 

A comment is added to a ticket in System A and needs to be added to the corresponding ticket in System B. When the integration updates the record in System A that triggers the integration to update the corresponding record in System B.

Since comments are additive, the naive approach is just to add the comment to System B.  This would result in a cycle repeatedly adding the comment on both sides of the integration.

What is the best way to avoid this type of integration cycle?

Hey there, @mericson! Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Community! 🙌🏽

I wonder if some of these related topics might be helpful as you’re digging into this.
 

It might also be helpful to share some screenshots of your current zap setup for other members to help troubleshoot. 🤗

Looking forward to digging into this with you! 

Thank you for the suggestions, they both address specific scenarios for avoiding loops / cycles.   I was asking more of a general best practices question but also would find it valuable to learn of a specific recommendation to the 2nd scenario adding child/related data like ‘notes’ to a record 

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