Steps

Steps are the building blocks you use to create workflows. You can easily combine multiple steps into a workflow to integrate your apps, data and APIs:

• Steps include triggers, code and prebuilt actions.

• Steps are executed linearly, in the order they appear in your workflow.

• You can pass data between steps using steps objects.

• You can observe the execution results for each step including export values, logs and errors.

• Types of Steps
  • Trigger
  • Code, Actions
• Step Names
• Passing data to steps from the workflow builder
• Step Exports
• Step Notes
  • Adding or editing a note
  • Showing notes
  • Current limitations

Types of Steps

Trigger

Every workflow begins with a single trigger step. Trigger steps initiate the execution of a workflow; i.e., workflows execute on each trigger event. For example, you can create an HTTP trigger to accept HTTP requests. We give you a unique URL where you can send HTTP requests, and your workflow is executed on each request.

Code, Actions

Actions (opens new window) and code steps drive the logic of your workflow. Anytime your workflow runs, Pipedream executes each step of your workflow in order. Actions are prebuilt code steps that let you connect to hundreds of APIs without writing code. When you need more control than the default actions provide, code steps let you write any custom Node.js code.

Code and action steps cannot precede triggers, since they'll have no data to operate on.

Once you save a workflow, we deploy it to our servers. Each event triggers the workflow code, whether you have the workflow open in your browser, or not.

Step Names

Steps have names, which appear at the top of the step:

When you share data between steps, you'll use this name to reference that shared data. For example, steps.trigger.event contains the event that triggered your workflow. If you exported a property called myData from this code step, you'd reference that in other steps using steps.code.myData. See the docs on step exports to learn more.

You can rename a step by clicking on its name and typing a new one in its place:

After changing a step name, you'll need to update any references to the old step. In this example, you'd now reference this step as steps.get_data.

TIP

Step names cannot contain spaces or dashes. Please use underscores or camel casing for your step names, like getData or get_data.

Passing data to steps from the workflow builder

You can generate form based inputs for steps using props. This allows the step reuse in across many workflows with different provided arguments - all without changing code.

Learn more about using props in our Node.js code step documentation.

WARNING

Passing props from the workflow builder to workflow steps are only available in Node.js code steps.

We do not currently offer this feature for Python, Bash or Go powered code steps.

Step Exports

Step exports allow you to pass data between steps. Any data exported from a step must be JSON serializable; the data must be able to stored as JSON so it can be read by downstream steps.

For examples of supported data types in your steps language, see the examples below.

• Node.js (Javascript)
• Python
• Bash
• Go

Step Notes

Pipedream lets you add notes to individual steps in your workflow so you can include helpful context to other workspace members or even yourself, and you can even write markdown!

Adding or editing a note

1. Enter build mode on any workflow
2. Click into the overflow menu (3 dots) at the top right of any step
3. Select Add note (or Edit note if making changes to an existing note)
4. Add any text or markdown, then click Update

Showing notes

1. Any step that has a note will indicate this with a special icon (shown below)
2. Click on the icon to hide or show the note

Current limitations

• Step notes are only accessible in Edit mode, and not from the Inspector

Still have questions?

Please reach out if this doc didn't answer your question. We're happy to help!