Using Variables

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.