Link Your Zaps: Easy Data Passing Between Zapier Automations | Tutorial
Let's build with Zapier and AI (100+ videos)📅 2023-09-30
Transcript
[00:00] welcome back to Corbin AI I hope everyone's having a great weekend I here to show you how to start leveraging artificial intelligence in your personal and your business life now this specific video we're going to be focusing on a specific tool that zapier provides called storage and what we're going to learn and have the ability to do after this video is the ability to pass data between different zapier flows now more specifically what I mean by that is let's say we have a zapier flow that's we're going to call it a that creates the first half of a book we're going to be able to pass the relevant context data from zap your a to the second zap
[00:30] flow which going to be zapier B in order to continue said book because of the fact of the limitations of zapier but also because of the fact that sometimes it is more effective to you know ensure that you have tasks done for automations at a smaller scale so you might be asking yourself okay what do you mean by that what do you mean by smaller scale so essentially if I had the choice between building out a zapier flow that does 80 different steps or breaking up that zap your flow into you know zap your a that does 40 the steps and then passing the relevant data to zap your B which does the other 40th steps this is
[01:02] going to be a more effective thought process and automation process when it comes to scale due to the fact that if you go to the original automation that's incurring for 80 different steps there is a higher probability of failure to incur because you're essentially betting that all 80 steps are going to work right which most cases will but if we split it up into two different flows we're going to give ourself more insurance but beyond all that in today's example I'm going to show you how to leverage this zapier toolkit which is called storage in the context of the earlier video I did this week where essentially I showed you how
[01:32] to create a book automation that essentially creates a book from start to finish automatically we're going to use that specific zap your automation we created here and we're going to go ahead and show you how to take the relevant context within that and pass it over to another zap your flow you can go ahead and extrapolate the value you get from this to any other business context you want to do it but let's go Ahad and learn how to essentially pass data between zap your automations all right so coming over to our flow that we created earlier this week this essentially was a flow where we had a Google form we provided input responses for the type of book we wanted and based
[02:03] off our limited amount of data that we provided here and I believe I can pull it up here there we go based off this limited amount of data here we were going to be able to generate an entire book but let's take this one step further here as the purpose of this video is not to show you how to finish this book but in the sense of let's say we want to make a complex Pham pass data between that is found in this automation to another automation so the way we do that is actually really simple and it simply is going to be the process C of creating storage blocks for whatever relevant data that you deem as valuable so let me just give you a real quick
[02:34] example so let's go ahead and do a storage block for the book title because this may be relevant for us a future in future flows that we have that is not in this specific automation so I'm going to go and drag this down here and we're going to do an event of set value so essentially the way this works is when I set a value here we're going to go go ahead and the DAT we're going to go ahead and Associate data with a specific uh quote unquote key um if you're familiar with code this is like setting up a variable like a const um but from here we're going to go ahead
[03:05] and just say title book and essentially we set up our Val variable here we're going to put in the value of what is title book and for us it's going to be the title of the book and essentially what this allows us to do is now we've Associated this variable or key in this context to title book and what this means and I can just show you real quick in this flow is we can go ahead and call upon it later but more importantly we can call upon it in other zap your flow so let me just show you what it looks like when we call upon it we're going to say get value here continue continue I'm
[03:38] going to put title book I'm going hit continue here and then I'm going test this step and then that title should show up here and there we go so the wheels might be turning in your head right now let's go ahead and you know really flesh this out and show you the value that you can get here so right off the bat here let's go ahead and Cas so we got the title book we can go ahead and rename this let me zoom in here we can go ahead and rename this to title book stored and then let's go ahead and that's going to be relevant for us because of a couple things one just
[04:09] because we can reference that as right now our Google doc the way it's saved is going to be the title of the book so we're going to use that later in the other zap your flow as you'll see here so let me go and show you some valuable Insight here so there's one thing you can do here where essentially you know the limit of the amount of data that is associated with the storage block is pretty big here so let me just give you an example this let's say we wanted to store the first chapter that's outputed or the first half of the chapter so we're going to go ahead and say uh set value here going to continue continue and then
[04:41] we put in the key uh verse Chap and then we'll go ahead and put the value here we'll give the output here right so this is a pretty big chunk of data here and as you'll see this all this data can be associated with first chat and we're going to be able to call upon this data in a later flow so this can handle big amounts of data which is nice to know as it isn't just limited to like 32 characters 64 characters and stuff of this nature all right so now that we know it can handle big pieces of data we also know it can handle fundamental pieces of data that are formatted let's go aad and learn a little trick here
[05:12] that may be important for whatever your business context is it's not necessarily important for this one because we may need a lot of the the chapter in order to continue the chapter but let me show you a little trick here so let's say we're dealing with data and essentially there is certain parts of that data that we care about and there certain parts we don't care about so we want to store only certain parts or let's just say we want to compress the data because it's not all the data that is presented is not relevant so let me go ahead and give a chat GT block here what you're going to want to do here is you're going to want to use uh conversation and you're going
[05:44] to want to use a model of gbt 3.5 and turbo and 16k if uh it require if it's a lot of data you're trying to compress let's just say in this context since it's not that much we're going to compress chapter the first half the chapter one we're going to say base off this chapter we're going to give chapter here because we've identified chapter as a variable there do parenthesis and we're going to go ahead and input the reply here there we go going to say generate a
[06:16] you know let's just say one sentence summary obviously we can add more proctoring more structuring but for now it should be good random 32 characters ensures consistent outputs I'm going to test action here and based off this entire block of text we're going to get one sentence summary here okay perfect and what we can do here is we can go ahead and add our storage block here and Storage by zapier and now based off that you know big amount of data we can go ahead and set the value here to you know
[06:46] Su chat and essentially provide the reply here so in this specific context it may not be relevant or pertinent but there is going to be context here where essentially maybe it's a lead email maybe it's something that's incurring within your back end of your system where essentially there is going to be a certain point of data that is found within an Automation in your business that is relevant that you could use in other parts of automations but you can't necessarily grab that piece of data for maybe a multitude of reasons one reason
[07:17] might be the initial Trigger or the the underlying way to access that piece of data is limited so you know you can't really trigger you know new file on Google Drive you can't really trigger it to access it another reason might be the fact that that specific diesa data would be in theory accessible but the problem is that it's not natively integrated into zapier so you would have to do a custom API work in order to access that piece of data but for now as you see here you can go ahead and grab that piece of data put it as a storage block and use it later so now that we understand the fundamentals of a storage block let's go ahead and jump over to
[07:48] build out a new zap your flow and call upon these pieces of data now before I do that one thing I want to remind youall is remember the name of the document that we're naming here for this specific context of creating this book is going to you know it's the output of name here that we saved here so let's go ahead and create that new zap we're going to go ahead and come over to the generator here say create new zap here so in this specific context let's act like we're building out a super complex flow to essentially um write this book at the end of that flow essentially what
[08:19] we did was with the relevant information that we got in that flow we created a new document with all that you know outputs and we put it into our Google drive folder so what we can do here is actually one thing I need to do before I even do that is I actually need to give myself some sample data here so let me go ahead and jump back over to that book generator here I'm going test this action just so you can kind of see it live so we go ahead and let me see edit draft here and we come down here and essentially this is just if you're interested in this whole mockup you can check out the video here it's just called automate book creation and
[08:51] essentially we're putting this in the folder called YouTube zaps here I'm going to retest this uh step here and as you see if I come over here it should pop up right here there we go and this is the relevant you know showing you the creation process but this is the file we're dealing with here so let's go ahead and come back over to that zap I was just creating there we'll go and create a new one because we might as well we didn't really do any much work on it yet so I'm going to go and create a new zap here and essentially in this specific context uh what we care about is a Google Drive a new Google doc being
[09:21] created right so I don't know what your context may be for why you would want to call upon your storage values again for this one is calling to be new documented folder we're going to continue here we're going to choose our account for us we are playing around with our course's account here we're going to continue and then the specific folder that we care about is going to be the YouTube's apps because that's where we designated the drop place I'm going hit test trigger here and based off that test trigger here if I hit title uh title you will see that we got our title here so in order to ensure this works perfectly
[09:51] we're going to add a filter block here and then before the filter block we're going to add a storage block so we're going to add a storage block here and with storage block we're going to get that value that we set for the title of the book and if I remember correctly I believe it was just title book continue here test this step and then we should get there we go and then from here we're only going to continue if the title of the book matches the document that was just added here so we're going to say exactly matches and then we're going to come over here and we're going to go to
[10:23] title there we go so this ensures that this flow does not Ur any way any further unless we are specifically dealing with the specific uh first half of the book we created in the you know zapier a now we're in zapier B so what incurs in zapier B what incurs in zapier B is now in theory if I would have stored the table of contexts I could call it into here so let's just call some values just so kind of see what I mean by this so let's go storage here and we're going to say uh get value I'm going to go ahead
[10:53] and open the other automation real quick so coming over to the other automation here just going grab the values uh you know remember we did the one value set where essentially we just summarized the first half of the chapter coming over here I can say get value continue continue hit some Chap and then essentially test step we're going to get the summary of the chapter here in a whole new Z flow there we go and then it the last one that we went ahead not that the last one we went ahead and did was grab the entire underly chapter here so we're going to see first Chap and we can
[11:25] go ahead and just duplicate this or not duplicate it doesn't want me to duplicate it it's fine hit storage here and we're just going to go ahead and get this value again and continue continue and we're going to put the first chap here test test step and then we should get the entire data that we Associated and put in there so perfect we got all the data Associated there and obviously you know you build out your entire flow here now it's like it can kick it off once it's done with the first half of the book it'll kick it off to this one because a new dock will be created and we'll make sure that Doc
[11:56] is the one we're associating with everything that we care about and then we'll kind of proceed from here now your next question might be okay what if the the underlying value changes don't worry so what I mean by that essentially is that when you recreate that book or whatever your process is when if there's a new variable here like uh let's just put you know bananas and I hit continue here and I retest this step the value that this is going to call upon here is going to be bananas because we essentially reset the key we reset the associated data to that
[12:26] key so that concludes this video in the context of understanding how to pass zap your data between A and B this is valuable in a lot of different context this is especially valuable when you're dealing with very long flows or in the sense that you want to call upon data that is relevant to you that maybe is hard to access now just to give you some more context of what's incurring here if uh essentially officea gives us a nice little drag and drop UI what's actually incurring in the back end here is essentially you're creating a a variable
[12:58] a constant variable in your quote unquote file and the con variable is going to be you're essentially putting in live data into that variable right so what does apples mean apples means you know this chat DVT output and when you go from zapier a to zap your B in the context of code you're essentially importing the value you created in this file to this file I just want to give that brief like I feel like I should start giving a little bit more like legit like not uh how do I say this real
[13:28] practical uh information when it comes to like what's happening in the back end when it comes to the code and how it communicates because knowing that intuitively is going to help you build out better flows and essentially now that you know that's kind of how it's communicating in that context but without further Ado if you felt value in today's video make sure to like the video it's completely free I'm going to leave a playlist here at the end where essentially we're jumping into all 5,000 apps on zap year I'm showing you how to leverage every single one when it comes to artificial intelligence I encourage you to check it out it saves you time saves you money without further Ado I'll see you in the next video thanks for tuning in and yes surprise I'm an AI
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