Using Variables

Learn how to use variables to store and access data outside of nodes.

When handling data within the flow of an automation, you usually connect a data socket to another socket to get the data from one point to the other.

For example, when you fetched Facebook Ad Ids, a typical pattern would be to connect them directly to the Fetch Facebook Ads node as this typically is the next logical step.

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However, as your automations get more complex, there are also cases, where you have data at one point and only want to (re)use it at a much later step of the automation or also in a completely different logical part of the automation. Dragging socket connections across the entire screen and passing data through multiple grouped levels can quickly become cumbersome and lead to a rather chaotic setup.

 

Examples use-cases include:

  • Temporarily storing data during an automation
  • Setting up default values when building automations for future duplication
  • Storing often re-used datapoints (i.e. referenced spreadsheet ids or ad account ids)

This is where the concept of variables comes in:

Variables allow you to store any type of data outside of the automations’s socket-to-socket data flow and retrieve, as well as update the data at any other point.

 

How to set up, update, and retrieve variables

Set-Up a variable

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When you’re in the builder view, click the upper left Menu button to reveal the menu. Then click on the Variables tab. When we click on Create a Variable, we can now give it a name, a description and a starting value (JSON, string, number or boolean). This value can also be left blank.

 
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Update a variable

In order to set or update a variable, we can use the Update Variable node. We simply select the variable we want to update by name and pass it the new data.

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Retrieve a variable

To retrieve a variable and use its value, we can use the Fetch Variable node. We need to select the variable by name and the node will return its current value.

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Last updated on February 7, 2023