Community Tip Jar: Pipelines Tips and Tricks
In the last two weeks we threw wide the gates and Pipelines went live to all our of customers and we continued launching new channels that Pipelines can integrate with. Bringing together the power of...
Forum Discussion
A couple tips from my experience so far:
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Brad Lemke
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- When exploring Pipelines for the first time, start small and start by trying to duplicate an already existing automation (that only has one or two steps) built in your app. This will familiarize you with the intrinsic differences between Automations and Pipelines as well as their similarities - building your confidence to take it a step further and plug into other services.
- Don't be discouraged if a channel you're looking at doesn't have exactly the function you're looking for, because that's what the Webhook and Json Handler channels can be configured to accomplish.
- The Json Handler channel is incredibly powerful, allowing you to both post an API call to another service as well as make use of the response in later steps of the Pipeline.
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Brad Lemke
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- Hi Brad,
I'm curious which channels have you been using the Json Handler for if I might ask? I've been looking for some good examples to use in some tutorials and practice building with Pipelines.
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Evan Martinez
Community Marketing Manager
Quick Base
------------------------------- So far, I've only used the Json Handler channel to interact with Dropbox's Api. Their API Reference Guide is nearly as polished as Y'all's, which made the uncharted territory of this channel surprisingly manageable.
My specific action in Pipelines with this channel is to Post a "Create Shared Link" command to their API. This action is actually much easier (self-explanatory) to do with a Webhook, but the Webhook channel does not allow for response processing to be used in later Pipelines steps.
With the Json Handler, I am able to query the response and pull the data to then use in later steps - in this case I post the share link to the Quickbase record that I uploaded the picture (to dropbox in an earlier step) from.
I'm actually working on a full detailed writeup of this 'Fully Automatic File Attachment Management System' for my own record so that I can take my work on this project and bring it back to my company and incorporate it into several processes that we actively avoided using Quickbase as a solution for because of the restrictive/expensive attachment space limitations.
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Brad Lemke
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