New Automation action - Create dynamic lookup table

[#1]

Hey all!

Simeon here, one of the developers on Automation. Just writing a quick heads up that your favourite Swiss army knife style component, Create lookup table, will soon have another model sitting alongside! Coming your way is the "Create Dynamic Lookup table" action - very catchy title, I know!

Quick side quest for those that don’t know what a lookup table is. Essentially, it is a table with two columns - a key column and a value column. The values in the key column are unique (there is only ever one key of a particular value) while the value column can contain whatever it likes. You then get to a value by using a key - you can also thing of it as an index. An example might look like:

Key	Value
team1	Avengers
team2	Animaniacs
team3	A Team

So, in this very simple example we’re mapping team identifiers to the name of the team. If I ask the table for “team1” I get an answer of “Avengers”.

Alright, side quest done. Lets talk about dynamic. With this iteration, instead of manually defining all your table entries, you specify a source smart value (which needs to be a list / collection) and then indicate which property of it to use for the table key and which to use for the table value:

The dynamic source is a smart value that returns a list of data. You then specify the property of the data to use for the key and the property for the value then this action turns it into a lookup table, which you can use just like the existing lookup table:

{{departments.get("HR")}}

This is pretty cool as you can now turn data from your incoming webhook, Assets object look up, issue lookup or anything else that is a list into a lookup table. Got a really big lookup table that you created manually that you want to use in a few rules? Store it in Assets then an Assets lookup + this new component means you can easily use it in many rules - you can even update it in Assets from other Automation rules! See this example and others in action in this Loom:

It is rolling out over the next few days, so happy Automating folks!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Oh wow 😮 Lookup table was quite powerful, but this brings it to another level.

We're exploring alternatives for the Lookup Manager app in DC, and this, together with Assets, sounds quite promising. 👀

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Simmo 

Awesome new feature!  Thanks to you and the team for their continuing improvements to the automation features.

FYI the new documentation for this feature is different than the UX your images and video show: the component name and the key / value mapping layout are different.  Which one is correct?

Thanks again!

Kind regards,
Bill

[David Berclaz (Apwide)]

Hi @Simmo

Love that! So powerful when coupled with Assets!

Cheers,

David