What is field mapping?

Field mapping, in essence, is the process of determining what data you want to move into a particular field. In our Custom Integrations, field mapping can be easily done using the "drag and drop" method. When you are building a recipe, you will notice that the interface can be split into 2 halves, the left-hand side, and the right-hand side. The left-hand side contains a list of fields, while the right-hand side, we will see the "App data" section.

In this section, you will see all the fields and pick lists that are associated with the app and the object you are working with. For example, if you are using the action "Create Object in Salesforce" and select "Account", You will see the fields that you will normally associate with creating an account in Salesforce. (Accounts in Salesforce is usually Company data)

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In this section, you will see a box labeled "App Data", also know as "Output Datatrees", with a couple of pick lists you can expand (e.g. Properties, trigger output etc.). Each of these lists contains the data associated with its source. In the example below, we see one of them is labeled "New row in sheet - Trigger output". This means that the data in that list is coming from the output of the trigger, and will contain the data from each new row that was created. When you expand these lists, you will see things we call datapills, and they look like this:

These pills are basically placeholders for the data associated with each field in the source app and object, in this case, Google Sheets and the rows in the sheet. This means that these pills will contain the data within the fields/columns for each particular job, and as such are dynamic in nature. As we can see, each column in the sheet that triggered the recipe will be available in pill form, such as "Company Name", "Site" and so on. These pills can then be used for mapping by dragging and dropping them into the fields on the left.

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Mapping is simple, you just need to identify which pills from one step needs to go to which pill from another step. For example, if you want a customer to be created in QuickBooks when an account is created in Salesforce, you will need to map the "account name" salesforce to "display name" QB, "Account Phone" in SF to "Phone" in QB, and so on. All you need to do is drag the relevant pills from the right, and drop them to the fields on the left. For certain apps, a suggested pill will also show up to help you with your mapping. You can also add static text to the field to add extra text to each piece of data, or also manipulate the data by shortening it or performing operations on it (more on that later, in our Advanced Building Section).

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This would mean that a fixed value is being placed into the field. Regardless of the job being processed, the data in the field will always remain the same.

An example of static mapping can be seen in the field below. This means that for every job processed, the account name will always be John Doe.

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Dynamic field mapping occurs when data pills are chosen as inputs. This means that the value passed into the field would vary accordingly to the object/record retrieved.

The "Company Name" datapill was dropped into the "Account Name" field, which means that depending on the job that was processed, the corresponding "Company name" value would be passed into the "Account name" Field

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Combination field mapping type occurs when static and dynamic field types are being used concurrently. A common example would be to add a fixed value to a dynamic field type, such as adding a number to a dynamic numeric value.

The example below shows how a static string is added to a dynamic string value

Formula field mapping type occurs when a formula is used to create an input into the field. This can be used to manipulate the value from a data pill. It could be used in a variety of ways, such as when users wish to split a string or apply an operator on numerical values. To toggle formula mode and text mode, hover you house over the field and you should see a toggle switch on the top right of the field. Typing in a period "." will give you a list of formulas and some basic explanations of what they do. Learn more about formula mode here.

You will notice that on the left of each input field and each pill in the app data, there will be a symbol displayed, such as "abc", "0.00" or a phone. These symbols indicate what type of data should go into the field or what kind of data is contained in a pill. For example, if a pill has an envelope symbol, that means it is an email pill.

The grayed values to the right of the pills are what we call metadata. The meta data allows you to take a peek at what kind of data does the field stores. Our app picks arbitrary a record field and uses it as the meta-data value.

Here's a list of the different types of data we have on Workakto

​What if I have custom fields in my apps?

Our Custom Integrations support custom fields on many of the apps we support, including but not limited to: Salesforce, Quickbooks, Infusionsoft, Eventbrite.

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