We all know that in the world of software, things move pretty fast. If you’ve been keeping up with all the recent product releases here at Quickbase then you’ll certainly agree that we’re no exception! For the most part, all that speed is typically a good thing, but we’ve learned that if you don’t stop once in a while, you can miss things. That’s why we make the conscious choice to periodically stop and take stock of how all these new product updates are working for you, our customers.

Over the last year, we’ve listened to feedback from many of you about different aspects of the workflow automation and integration capabilities that are supported by our Pipelines technology. One theme that has come through clearly is Pipelines offers substantial power and a staggering amount of control over automated and integrated workflow, but that breadth of capability can also make pipelines difficult to build and manage. That’s why we’re introducing improvements to the My Pipelines Page and an upcoming overhaul of the Pipelines building experience to make it easier to both manage existing pipelines and to build new pipelines without losing highly technical capabilities.

 

My Pipelines

We have been making incremental improvements to the My Pipelines page over the past year, allowing you to do things like tag pipelines for better categorization and filter the list by channel. In June 2022, we streamlined this page even further so you can jump into any of your pipelines with ease. Previously, this page displayed a details panel when clicking on the name of a pipeline. You would edit a pipeline by clicking the pencil icon:

 

The new design is more intuitive, where clicking a pipeline’s name allows you to edit that pipeline:

 

This comes with a few other improvements:

• Easier tagging: Tags are now displayed without needing to open the details panel. You can also quickly add new tags from the list. (The details panel is now accessible through the gear icon on the right side.)
• Improved performance: Builders with a large number of pipelines will notice the My Pipelines page loads more quickly than it did previously. We have split the list up into pages, so My Pipelines will better scale with your business’s needs.

The improved My Pipelines page is available to all customers today.

 

New Pipelines Builder

Another major area of focus for us is making it easier to learn how to build a pipeline. We are overhauling our pipelines builder page to empower more of your app builders to create powerful, automated workflows. It gives you:

• Everything you need in one place: The current building experience spreads information out in three different places – the list of steps in your pipeline, the field-selection panel, and the list of available channels and steps. We are consolidating this into a single interface:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• More flexibility, without giving up any power: The new builder page will save you time by allowing you to re-order and insert steps. It even allows you to go back to the trigger step and swap it out for a different type of trigger:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Take your Jinja skills to the next level: Jinja is a powerful function of Pipelines, supporting formula-like expressions as well as looping logic. An all-new “code mode” makes it easier than ever to add Jinja to your pipelines, providing syntax highlighting, line numbering, and even auto-completion of field names.
  
  
  

 
 

The new pipeline builder page is currently in beta. If you would like to participate, you can sign up here.

Putting it All Together

Beyond making it easier to build Pipelines, we are investing to improve many other aspects of the Pipelines technology. For example, you can read about improved pipelines management and governance here.

And as a reminder, Quickbase Automations is being retired in favor of Pipelines. On June 30^th, 2022, the ability to create new Automations will be disabled. You can read more about this process and the timeline to retire Automations here.