New option available in update automation

[YvesP]

Hello all, 

anybody seen the following in Automations:

I can't find any documentation on this.

Any ideas what the use case for this data being available might be?

[kuovonne]

I think this will be most useful for automation scripts where you don't want to hardcode the specific table and fields involved.

However, I feel that the current implementation isn't quite fleshed out. It is too hard to determine which table or field has been picked because it just shows the ID and not the name. I wish there were an option to pick the name of the table/field, and the value would be whatever is the current name of the table/field at runtime.

[ScottWorld]

I agree that they should’ve used field names instead of field IDs. Although I can’t figure out any circumstance where I would ever need this new functionality… I can’t think of a single viable use-case scenario for this.

[kuovonne]

@ScottWorld,

Here are some use cases that might interest you ...

- getting the ID of a table/field to be updated and then passing that to a Make webhook. This lets the Make webhook be more generic, where you don't have to hardcode the specific table and field into the Make scenario. You could have a single utility Make scenario that works in different tables/fields instead of having duplicates where the only difference is the table/fields involved. For example, I have a single Make scenario that I reuse to make QR codes in various different tables/fields. This also causes the automation to be listed in the field dependency checker.

- Creating a link to a specific cell in a data view (combining the record Url with the field ID)

[ScottWorld]

Thanks, @kuovonne, for these 2 great ideas! 😃🙌