Activepieces 101 / 2. Create Your First Flow

Tutorials Automation School
1

In this lesson, you’ll learn the basics of building automations in Activepieces. We will apply what we talked about in the previous lesson, specifically triggers, actions, flows and we will also get introduced to inputting data.

Before You Begin

Make sure you have an Activepieces account and are logged in to your dashboard.

Scenario

We want to create a flow that reminds us to buy groceries every X amount of time.

Let’s Build the First Flow

To build the flow that sends an email reminder, we will need to do the following:

  1. We will begin by adding a schedule that is scheduled to run every X amount of time, this acts as the trigger of the flow.
  2. Then we will have to add a step that sends an email, this acts as the action of the flow. We will be using the Gmail piece to send the reminder from.
  3. We will also need to configure the options and data given to the trigger and to the action according to our needs.

Looks easy? Let’s do it!

Watch this tutorial to apply the previous steps while considering our scenario “how to create your flow to buy potatoes every day”.

A deeper dive into what we did

  • Triggers: These are events that start your automation. In our example, we used a “Schedule” trigger.

  • Actions: These are the tasks that happen when the trigger fires. We sent an email using the “Gmail” action.

  • Data needed: Each trigger and each action require a different set of data to work properly, for example a schedule trigger needs to know how often it triggers, and for our specific case we chose daily and so it needed more information as follows:

    • Should the trigger be fired on weekends?
    • At which hour daily?
    • What is the time zone?

    Also, we needed to input data for the Gmail action so we connected to an account in Gmail to specify the sender of the email, we also specified the recipient, the subject and the body of the email and there were also more optional data to input if needed.

  • Flow: An action(s) that are activated when a trigger is fired.

Next Up: What is passing data? And why is it important?

In the next tutorial, you’ll learn what is passing information between different parts of your flow and why this is important.

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