Name: Pipelines 101
Uploaded: 2025-04-24T18:45:10.128Z
Duration: 1 h 43 min 56 s
Description: Pipelines 101

Transcript for "Pipelines 101": Hi, everybody, and welcome to our webinar today for pipelines one zero one. Thank you all for taking the time to join me. I already see a great question in the, chat, which is will there be a recording of this meeting after? Yes. So anyone who's joining us, be aware that we this will be recorded and on demand later after it's available. So if you have to step away, feel free to do so. What we're gonna be covering today is a Quickbase introduction to pipelines. I'm Evan from the Quickbase team. I'll be the host today. I'll also be, helping you out if you have any questions. So while we're waiting for a few more few people to trickle in, I do have a question for everybody else, though. I would love to know, what level of experience folks who are joining us today have with, pipelines. Like, to just get a baseline idea of, like, do you feel like you are brand new to pipelines? Do you feel like you're a pro? Just let me know while we give folks another minute to to join us today. Great. I'm starting to see some, so so I'm seeing a lot of people who are new with no experience to pipelines. You are in the right place both for new folks and beginners. Even if you're an intermediate or have some experience with Quickbase with pipelines, don't worry. We will be covering some stuff that might still be helpful for you, because we will be going over a few of the things that are recently added to pipelines that are making the job easier both for new admins as well as people who have been pipelines builders for a while that you might have missed. So there'll definitely be content for a little bit of everybody. Yeah. So just give it another minute to file in. While you're joining us, I like to also bring people's attention to you can see the chat right next to the where I'm presenting right now. Just above that, you'll see an option for docs, which is a bunch of links to resources that will help support stuff here, help documentation, links to other webinars that we're running, things that just kind of go along who we're talk covering today in case there's anything you'd like to have to carry with you. And there's also a section marked q and a. That's where you can drop drop any questions you have. We will be doing a q and a section at the end of what today's webinar. So we'll be making sure to circle back if you have any burning questions on pipelines. Worst case scenario, if we ask something super tricky, I might have to get back to you, but otherwise, I'll try to answer as many questions as I can during today's webinar. Alright. We'll give everybody just another minute or so to filter in, answer what they think their level of experience pipelines is, seeing a ton of participation. Thank you. It's super helpful, as we think about the right level for everything today. I see, Daniel, that you've mentioned you are getting some weird audio glitching. If you're still getting it, one of the things that's silly enough, but, refreshing sometimes helps folks with their audio when we just started a webinar. If you give it a quick refresh of the window, you might get better audio. Alright. So it looks like we've got a good number of people joining us, so we'll we can shift over from, from this. I'll leave the poll open. Folks can still find it if they wanna answer it in the poll section. Otherwise, we can jump into today's webinar. So what we're gonna start with is just a quick introduction of our agenda for today. So so if we're gonna talk about what are pipelines, both a little bit of an overview on pipelines themselves and the terminology you'll hear us talk about. If you we're gonna talk about authentication, what you need to do to make sure your pipelines will authenticate and work correctly. In Quickbase, we're gonna give a quick review of the pipelines designer, which is the most common way folks build pipelines by, from scratch. Then we're gonna go into a demo of how someone could build a pipeline using a change log. Then we're gonna talk a little bit about our newer tools for AI that help you build pipelines, which will be a nice juxtaposition to how you do it manually, and then we'll add it off with some q and a time where you can ask me any of the questions you might have today. Let's see. So moving on, we're gonna move right into pipelines overview. What are pipelines? What brought you here today? So let's see. So what is a pipeline? At the beginning of the basically, the the simplest way to think about it is, pipelines are automated workflows that help you integrate either with other systems or help automate systems in Quickbase itself. So what you'll commonly think about is a pipeline will do work on the back end for you to help you automate any of your existing workflows in Quickbase or to integrate with any of the systems you are using in your company. So, before an automation you or an integration, you might be thinking, okay. I have a ton of employee data in my Salesforce. I need to download that and then and have a CSV of it, take it into Quickbase, and manually upload that. Or worse, I have a couple of new tickets in my Jira. I need to manually translate them over one to one from Jira into Quickbase. Similarly, you could be using pipelines to automate simple stuff that your teams are doing today manually. Every time they create a new customer, they need to go in and create some new records in order to track the things that they should be doing to, like, kick that customer off and get them onboarded. Wouldn't it be great if every time they create a new new customer, that work was being done on the back end so that they just have all the resources that they need? And so at the highest level, we're just thinking about pipelines as a tool available to you to both automate and integrate. And pipelines is just the term we use internally in Quickbase when we talk about those things. So a little bit more of the terminology that you'll hear us talk about. This is really helpful for future steps or if you ever read any of our documentation or if you put in a support case. When you think about a pipeline, pipelines is overall as a service we offer. Channel is an individual service or platform like Quickbase automation or connecting to Outlook or connecting to Slack. That's a channel. It basically just describes one of our prebuilt integrations that we have with either our own service or or someone else's services. And within a channel, you'll you'll be offered a lot of steps, and those steps are an event in the channel or a task in the channel that you can perform. Basically, it allows you to think about it as I know I can connect in the channel that is Slack, but then my steps are sort of the menu of things I could do in Slack using automations or using pipelines. And so when you think about those kinds of steps, there's basically three common types of steps. One is a trigger. That is the event that your channel is looking for. You're essentially saying, I want to start this pipeline when something happens. It could be in Quickbase. It could be outside of Quickbase. It can kind of figure out either way. The most common trigger we can think about is something like whenever a record changes, I would like something to happen. And then you would be able to dictate more specifically this when the record in this table changes and these values change. Alternatively, a trigger could be time based. You could say every day at 9AM, I wanna start this pipeline and have it gotten do work for me. Then from after our triggers come our actions. When I know when I want the pipeline to start, now I need to tell the pipeline what I want it to do. And the reason why we think of these as steps is a pipeline can do more than one action. That could be creating multiple records in another table. That could be creating records across multiple tables. That could be doing multiple things in other systems. You can start really simple and say I would like for one change to create one or one trigger to have one action. You can also expand and have multiple actions take place. And then the last type of step we think about is a query. Sometimes before you're ready to commit to taking an action, you wanna first search for, an object or something in the platform you're connecting with. Really common example, if I add a customer into Quickbase, I want them to be mirrored over into my Salesforce database. But what if they're already there? What if the two systems you know, somebody put them in manually into Salesforce, they hadn't gotten to Quickbase yet? I would like to run a query first that says look for this user's email address. And if it already exists in Salesforce, I don't wanna make another one. I don't want duplicates. And similarly, you can do those kinds of things in Quickbase as well to help you avoid duplicate data, to help you avoid, creating more work for yourself than you realistically want there to be. And so when we think about, as I mentioned earlier, the types of pipelines, there's really three types that you can use these steps with. They are triggered, which just means you are looking for a specific event in real time to happen, a record to be saved, a certain status to be reached, things like that. They're scheduled, which is I wanna set a timeline for things to run, whether it be every day, every week on Sunday at at midnight. I'd like to run a backup of some of the records in my app and just save them over to an audit table. And then lastly, you have the option for manual. This is, set up so you can run from a click of a button or from a step in another pipeline. So what this means is that you might have a step. It's a pipeline that exists somewhere that does a very specific thing for you. You could have future pipelines just essentially call for that pipeline to run as well. That's one of the things you can do. It's a more complicated workflow, but it's kind of thing that, like, in the future, as you go deeper, if you want to sort of build these more complex workflows, that is an option as well. And so when you're thinking about building your pipelines, you gotta kinda think about, like, where do you start in Quickbase? So the first place you start and where most of your pipelines action is gonna happen is your my pipelines page. If you have access to pipelines in Quickbase and you're using our newer navigation, if you click on the little waffle menu that appears in the upper left hand corner, you'll see an option for pipelines. That will take you to this page. And what this page does is it essentially gives you a list of the names and types of all of your pipelines, whether they're turned off, whether they're turned on, when last time they ran was, if they run into any errors, and that will help you sort of manage your pipelines overall. By default, you will see your own pipelines. This is anything that you've built for yourself. If you happen to also be the realm administrator for your account, you'll see at the very top, there's a little flip where it shows sort of like a person of a picture or a person of a of another, like, icon. That can also switch it over so you can see all of the accounts on your realm, but that is just for folks who are account admin or for realm admins. That allows them to see other folks' pipelines as well as their own. Not everyone will have this. If it's something you should have, that's definitely something you can chat about with, the other admins at your company if you're supposed to be helping with manage pipelines. So this is sort of like your command central for all pipelines. And, also importantly, when we were talking about our channels available earlier, we do have a channels page you can go to that will let you know, what channels we have now, if there's future channels in development, and also what plan they're available on. So for each of our, plans in Quickbase, team, business, and enterprise, we make a different menu of, channels available starting with a smaller list on Teams, and then you get the Teams list and the business list on business and and so on with enterprise. Essentially, at enterprise, you get every channel, and you get a slightly smaller menu as you go further down. So this is a great resource if you ever find yourself wondering, do I have access to a particular channel that I'm interested in? Can I connect to Autodesk? Can I connect to Amazon s three? Can I connect to, you know, any of the other services that I make use of outside of the company? The Quickbase channel is available for everybody. So whenever you're thinking about Quickbase for automation, that's something that everyone can do. This channel list, you can when you're in pipelines itself, viewing them, there is an option to see channels in the upper right hand corner. So it's at the very top of the menu. There's an option for, auto activity logs and channels, and that will take you to the channels list. You can also Google Quickbase channels, and there's a help article that says the same thing. It's just available in both places. Yeah. Absolutely. So I just have a quick question on it. Can I repeat how to get here? Yep. If you are using the newer navigation for Quickbase, you would click on the little menu in the upper left hand corner that if you think about it, it kind of looks like a little waffle, and it will open up a set of options for you like apps, exchange. One of the options, if you have access to pipelines on your account, should be a pipeline choice. If you don't see that, that might mean that you don't have pipelines permissions right now. That could be something you need to bring up with your admin if you don't have access to build pipelines in your account. But that's the easiest place to way to get to the my pipelines page we talked about a little bit earlier. Alright. And so next, we think about, the channels. So if we were talking about now that I know where to go to get my pipelines, I know what channels I have access to, what are some of the things that can happen inside of, like, the Quickbase channel? So let's this is our example of, like, I wanna do stuff in Quickbase. There's you can basically look a lot more for, what are the trigger what are the records that I can change? Are there bulk record sets I can change? Can I move file attachments? Can I use the Quickbase API? These are all things that you can do with our Quickbase channel, which is the one that will work essentially between Quickbase apps or even between Quickbase accounts. And so that's the channel we're gonna talk about the most today because everyone has access to it. It's a great starting point because you don't have to know how to integrate with any of your other systems. You just have to be familiar with Quickbase itself. And so that is where we are starting kind of talking about, automations today. So you are super interested in building pipelines. You're starting to get some of the wheres and whats, and now you're thinking about, like, okay. What is one of the things that could that I have to do really early on? So one of the first things you need to do with pipelines is authenticate, and that's how pipelines verifies your permissions. You might be thinking, like, why do I need it? How do I do it? What does authenticating even mean? So, basically, pipelines is a separate service that is part of Quickbase, but it's not part of any of your individual apps. So while it might work on a single app because it can work on many apps, it kind of runs on its own service. So we do ask that folks authenticate, which basically just means providing us, the right pieces of information inside of a pipeline so that we know that you're supposed to that you want us to actually have the permissions to run that pipeline for you. It's mostly because if you think about it, stuff is running on the back end. We wanna make sure you've given, the access code essentially to the stuff that's running. And should in the future, for example, you have someone on your team build pipelines, should they leave the company and you no longer want those pipelines to run, when their access goes away, those pipelines will also turn off because it will no longer have their access code or their key that allows them into your account. And so when you're thinking about creating our authentication, there it's a simple it's a fairly simple method. We need to know what is the default for your realm. We need to know what your user is, and we need a user token for you. And so those all probably sound like technical things. They're actually not as hard to find as you would worry about. For your Realm default account, that is just going to be the subdomain of your Realm. That is what you can find when you look up in your when you sign into a credit of your Quickbase apps, if you look up into the address bar above in your browser, it's the part that comes after HTTPS but before Quickbase. So it might be, my company. You think of it like mycompany.Quickbase.com. You just need to know the my company part, whatever that might be, and that will help you bring that information over into your pipeline. What's great is you just need to do this. The first time you're setting up pipelines, you don't have to do this every time, but this is just to set you up with this is the account I'm looking to connect to. Then you're going to be asked to put in your user token. Your user token is thinking of it basically like your personal access code for services like pipelines. It is a combination of your username and your password put together. But when you build your token, you assign which applications it works for. So you're saying they can use my credentials, but they only can be used them for these two applications. User tokens are still, like like, basically, you giving someone out, like, a one time passcode or a, multiuse passcode but for specific use. You wanna think of these as things that you wanna keep secure. You wanna keep your user tokens to yourself. You want don't wanna make sure you won't don't want to share them because they can be used, in services like pipelines to essentially grant access to the specific resources that you would have access to in, use your your in your user tokens. So you wanna just make sure that when you're building, you know, okay. I I know what my URL is to be when I'm asked for it, and I know where my user token is. And with those two things, you can essentially set up your pipelines and get yourself ready to go. And I included some help documents in the doc section in the upper right hand corner that include the steps on how to create your own user tokens and manage them. So that way you don't have to listen to me go through the explanation and hopefully be able to catch up. You can just reference those anytime. They'll just be here during the webinar, but also they'll be on the on demand version so you can always come back to them or just Google click base user tokens. You can use these a lot with services that integrate. Alright. And then let me see. So I'm gonna move us over. That's we've talked a little bit about what is the terminology for pipelines, what do I need to do to make sure that I can get pipelines running the way I want them to for the Quickbase channel. Now we're gonna talk about the actual mechanics of building a, pipeline. So what you're what we're gonna use when you build pipelines is our pipelines designer. It is essentially just a simple drag and drop interface, as simple as building integrations and automations between any system can be, that help you build your pipeline from scratch. It uses a panning navigation bar with an infinite canvas. So essentially as you keep adding more steps, it'll just get longer and longer, and you can, basically zoom into or out of the various steps. So as you're building, you just kinda drop in what you're what you're working on and go through step by step. We will cover an example of this in our demo in a little bit. This is just to get you an idea of, like, what is the canvas or that I'm using? What is the designer that I'm using? You can also adjust the order of steps. So, like, in older versions, as some of you have tried pipelines in the past, maybe you've been a long time pipelines builder, you may remember there was a version where if you had to add a step in the middle, you had to rebuild your pipeline. Now if you use the pipeline designer, you can adjust the order with ease and drag and drop as you need to so you can make sure your steps happen in the right order, and that you don't have to start over should you accidentally put things out of order. You can also dive more into the details of your pipeline. You can see details on the name, the description, if you've applied any tags. You can see more details on this statistics, like how often has it run or errored. This just gives you information especially in the cases of if you see a pipeline with a lot of errors. This can help you figure out why isn't my pipeline working. Did I forget to include the right user token? Am I connecting to the wrong, service? Am I potentially connecting to great example would be I'm whenever I create one record, I'd like this app I'd like my pipeline to create a record another table. I forgot to include a required field in that table. So whenever I go to create the record, it's basically giving me an error. These errors will help you figure that stuff out so you can go back and make any tweaks that you need. And then lastly, there's a reference widget widget, which is super helpful and one of the newer things. There's a little, icon that appears in the upper left hand corner, that looks like a couple of dots tied together. If you click that, it opens up a reference widget that pulls in a bunch of the information you've been using in your pipeline so that as you move up and down, you won't have to go back up to earlier steps to reference what fields you were using. It will give you a lot of that information. Essentially makes it easier for you to pull all the fields and information you need. If you're one of those folks that tried pipelines in the past and found that you had to kinda juggle up and down and move over move all around to find data, this is gonna keep you more focused on where you're working. It makes it a lot easier. And I think I've just gotten to the end of the designer. I see a couple of questions coming in, so I'm gonna take a quick pause and check if there's any questions that were fresh on the designer itself. Let me know if anyone has anything. Let's see. I've got a question here on, can pipelines integrate with with Outlook? Yes. That is available on our business and enterprise level plans that you can axe integrate with Outlook. There's some settings you need to make sure correct on your Outlook, but it is possible. See what else do we have. Is there anything else that I can answer here? I've seen a couple more video questions about videos. Yes. This will be available on demand. You will be able to reaccess this recording later. You just use the exact same link you used to join today after the webinar is over, and it will take you right back to the recording of this. And I see you got a couple of questions here where we can go over some of this stuff at the end. I don't see any, we could go through. And you'll I see someone had a question on how to get to the quick reference widget. The demo I, have that I'm gonna play in just a little bit, we'll go through that much clearer. You'll be able to see it all visually and and follow along. So we'll make sure to get to that in our demo. Alright. So gonna move on from here into the next section, which is what is our demo going to be? So it's not just enough to know that pipelines can do stuff. A big question a lot of people have early on is, like, how? How do I do this stuff? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna run a demo today showing how to use pipelines for a, a change log. What this means is that I wanna automatically create a record in my change log table every time I change something in, a certain table. And so for this one, we're thinking about, I wanna keep change logs of all the edits I made on my employee records. And so when we're building it, those are the two pieces of a pipeline we wanna think a lot about are what are what's our trigger that's gonna kick off our pipeline and what are the actions we want our pipeline to take. In this example, we're gonna look for anytime a record is updated in our employees table. If someone changes their first name, last name, date of birth, or date of birth, and then we wanna make sure that for all the subsequent steps, we, keep using those fields. We're gonna bring their values along. And then our action is we're gonna create a change log table. We're gonna capture users who changed that record and when, and then we're also gonna capture the current value of those fields, what they changed to, but also what they were. So, for example, if I change someone's name because they got married and they decided to change their last name, it will know what their previous name was and what the name is now after the record was changed. This is a great way for folks to track things like the changing statuses on their projects, changes if, changes on delivery dates if something has to move out, and they wanna just make sure they have a little record. So they can figure out, like, oh, this project came in three months behind, and we changed the delivery date on this project four different times, and these are the folks who basically put the change in. Or it can be really simple things. Like, I like, here, this example is great on maybe names changed and you realize someone's name was wrong. You can kinda track backwards, like, how did it happen? And so for us today, we are going to use and don't be scared by it. The like, there's a lot of pie parts of pipelines where you can drag and drop and pull things in. Sometimes you need to know a little bit more about the, things that you're pulling over. You wanna do a little bit of a calculation or run a little bit of a change on your, the values that your pipeline's bringing over. You can do that with what's called Jinja. It is a language that's available for programming kind of it's a standard across a lot of different systems. So learning it actually can be helpful because it can help you use other tools as well besides just, pipelines. We're gonna use our real simple ninja snippet that allows you to to allows us to do a little, transformation on a value. It's gonna be we're just basically gonna use this one, which is called a dot pre a dot, dollar sign p r e v, and then our field. And you'll see an example of this. I just wanna bring it out as, like, watch for this in the demo because it's a really handy tool. What this basically says is I would like to, not just pull over the value of a field. I wanna see the previous value of the field before it was edited. So this is great for change logs, great for a lot of other things. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna dump jump into our demo. And give me one sec to pull that up. Alright, everybody. Now we're getting ready to we're getting ready to jump into our demo. First day, we're gonna be using our Neptune plumbing HR app. We're gonna imagine that one of the things we're really interested in this app is making sure we're tracking changes to our employees' data. For this instance, we're going to say we're really interested in knowing if someone changes the first name, last name, date of birth, or work ID for any of our employees. Similar use cases people might find is they wanna track when their status has changes in their changing their progress, when timelines change on important projects that they're running. They wanna make sure that they're keeping track of any of these important data points that they could use later to help them figure out, when when data changed, what it changed to. So first to jump into that, we're gonna go right up here into the waffle menu, and we're gonna select pipelines. This is gonna take us to our my pipelines page where I can create a brand new pipeline. And what I always recommend here is when you are getting started, make sure you name your pipeline something that will help you remember what it is. We're gonna do a change log on employees table in in Neptune HR. That way we just may remember that that's what this is for. It's to help us track when our employee chain table changes. So, what we're gonna look for is we're gonna look at our triggers first, and we're triggering off of a record being updated. What that lets us know is that we're looking for a record changing somewhere in our in our app. So for today, we're using that Neptune app. It's gonna give me a list of all of the apps I have available. I specifically wanna look at my employees table. And I don't wanna trigger on any field. I only wanna trigger on those fields we were interested in. And if we'll remember, that was first name, last name, a date of birth, and work ID. You can also select all if there's a very small list of fields you want. It's just gonna be a lot of potential changes for you to go through if you have everything. And then I'm also gonna wanna pick which fields I wanna use for subsequent steps. What this means is these are fields I wanna make sure I bring along with me when I go to fill in or use them in other steps that I make during the course of building this pipeline. And I know because it's a change log, I'm gonna wanna capture the value I had in first name, last name, date of birth, and work ID. So now, I've got it set up so that I have a trigger looking for changes on the HR employee table, specifically with any of these fields being changed. And I wanna bring that data along with me. Now, I'm ready to add my step. My next step is I wanna create a record, and that's gonna be my action. That is what I want to have happen when the trigger takes place. Similarly, I'm gonna be looking at my Neptune HR, app, but this time I'm gonna be going into the change log table. And I wanna select fields that I'm gonna specify my values for. You can either pick them individually, but for our use case today, we wanna change all of these. We wanna update everything in our new record when we create it. And that's gonna then go into giving us all these fields we're filling in. Don't worry. We're not gonna do it all without any help. We're gonna go over to our quick reference widget up here in the left hand corner. Pull it over here. And we're gonna look at those values we pass down from our triggering record along with a couple that are always captured. And so first for time stamp, we're just gonna use this updated at, which will tell us whenever the record is updated, bring that time down and put it into our time stamp. For changed by, we have the last modified by field. We're gonna grab the email address of the person who last updated this record. Then for first name, we are gonna go up and grab our first name field and bring it in. All pretty easy so far. This one might feel a little more tricky, but it's not too hard to get the previous value of this field. We're gonna bring the field name down again. We want first name, but we are going to use this little code snippet up here in left right hand upper right hand corner. And we're gonna use that value we talked about before we started the demo. We're gonna type in dollar sign preview prev and put a dot in. And what that's gonna now say is find this value before the record was changed. And, similarly, we can go down the list and start filling in the others. We're gonna bring last name down, and then we bring last name down again. And, similarly, we just go in dollar sign prev. And we can just go down the list and fill this in. This is really handy because it lets us grab these values pretty quickly, without having to go through a lot of other hoops. So just bear with me for a second while I fill these in. And lastly, we have work ID. And similarly, we're just gonna put in dollar sign prep. Now you don't always have to capture more information than this for your data change logs, but we have one additional field we wanna make sure we capture. All of our change logs are gonna be related back to an employee. We can use this as an opportunity to just bring down the record ID of that employee into the reported related employee field. What that will do is every time a change log is created, it'll be related back to the employee that triggered it. Not everyone's gonna need this. This is just kind of a nice to have. So now when we review our pipeline, we can see we have our trigger looking for this change with the correct fields we're pulling down, and then we are creating a brand new record, pulling a bunch of information from the record that was updated to let us capture a bunch real fast. Now we're not done just yet. Super, super important for this pipeline is you're gonna wanna make sure you turn it on. And then at any point, if you want to come back and check things like the activity, you can do so here with a little pipelines detail widget. It'll tell you details, statistics, basic information on your pipeline. That's just handy to have, if you ever wanna reference it. But now we should be set so that updating one of these fields will trigger us our creation of a, change log. So what we can do is go right back in. I I made sure to have an available record for us to use as a demo. And I can go in and update it. And let's say that Caroline, has decided to change her name, and it is now Murphy. And her work ID has changed because she's changed location. She's no longer in one office. She's in the other. So she's now in the NB office instead of the KH office, and we hit save. What that does is updates her record. We give it a quick second to let it run, and then we're gonna go check our change logs. And we should see a record for Caroline being changed from Caroline repel to Caroline Murphy. And then we can also see that we made a quick update to her work ID. And, basically, this is gonna be a way to capture a super simple change log that you can get a lot of use out of in your own applications. We're gonna jump back into the, we're gonna jump out of the demo now and back into the presentation. Hi, everybody. Thanks for I hope you all enjoyed the demo. We can jump back into our presentation now. I did see a couple of really good questions come in, so I'm gonna take a little pause here before we jump over to AI and answer a few of those questions because it seems like they're a good opportunity to chat about. Someone let me know a real common question that's coming up as a lot of folks are curious. Is there a way to save pipelines after someone leaves the company? There are a couple different options available to you. And, one of them is to turn a person's account into a service account. I'm gonna actually review what that is a little bit further along in the demo, but you can also just Google Quickbase Service Account, and it'll basically bring up a help doc that explains a little bit. What it basically can do is you can say this person has left. I would like to use a service account that others are able to sign into to access their information. You can also download the pipeline, upload the pipeline. Or if you're really concerned about long term viability of your pipelines and how you can use them as an organization, you can create a service account that all of your admins share that actually owns those all your pipelines. So that way, they can essentially sign in, jump onto the service account, build a pipeline, jump back to their normal user, and all of your pipelines will stay in that service account, which means you never have to worry about so and so is on vacation. I need to up down this I need to check out this pipeline because it's broken or somebody left or got promoted, and now there's not that responsibility to fix this broken pipeline for me. It'll just stay as a thing that the team can use. And I will definitely show you I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go further. I saw a bunch of questions on it. It's a really common question that we get. And then I saw that there was a good question on our change log audit our quest our change log use case today. You cannot unfortunately track any changes that were made prior to the creation of the pipeline. It'll only go forward for you. So that is one of those things that just you wanna think about for, for when you're setting up a log. You're basically logging going forward. And I'm just gonna check and see if there's anything else. Alright. So I think that's a good place for us to keep going. I see there's a question from Matthew on switching between service accounts as exclusive to sidebar nav in user preference. Yes. That is something that's gonna be on sidebar navigation going forward. I would definitely suggest if that's something you need to put, in the in your in, like, the in the older navigation, you could put in a, product feedback for that, but it is not something that I I they're working on right now. We're really part of our move to the newer navigation is that is the transitioning. That's where our resources for development go forward. A lot of features as they get become out come out will, will be available on things like new nav. So even if it's a little tricky even if the transition's a little painful or for the in the right be in the beginning, getting your users used to it, I still definitely recommend folks start that transition. You're just gonna see more and more stuff available that way. And so now we talked a little bit about building, from scratch and getting started using Quickbase, as pipelines designer. Next, we're gonna talk a little bit more about AI. And I have a little bit of an AI demo that I'll talk over while it runs so you can kinda see what it looks like. Give me one second to set that up. Alright. So we have, what can we do with the help of AI? So I've had a couple of few folks in this webinar already ask the question of I've mentioned, hey. I have things in automations, or I have things today in other systems, and I kind of daunted by the thought of, will moving over to pipelines take a lot of work manually? It can take a little work to get set up. Ideally, after watching this demo, maybe you'll feel a little less daunted. You'll realize it's not as as hard as it could be to you might have thought to build a pipeline to help you do some of your integration or simple automation work. But maybe you're still thinking, like, even that is gonna take a decent amount of my time, or I'm so new. I'm nervous about setting something up not knowing what it should look like or how to get started. Another option available now is to get help with, AI. And so available now in our pipeline service is an option for you if you said you see with a little magic wand at the bottom, you can click in and essentially give AI a prompt. You can explain what you're trying to do. And the click based AI will match this against a bunch of patterns we have for very common types of pipelines, grab you with the right channels, the right triggers, the right steps, and it will, in the background for you, build a template for your pipeline. There will still be some steps you need to fill in, but it will do a lot of the getting started work for you. For those of you who are thinking I'm on an older, service, like automations and I'm trying to transition over, but, like, that feels daunting, this could be a great way for you to speed up the process. You can be like, I'm gonna go in. I'm gonna just describe what that pipeline did or what that automation or what my other type of integration did for me. Can Quickbase get me started with a template? Can it essentially, produce for me the steps that I need, the triggers that I need, and then I just have to go in. And anything that shows up still as in red are the things you're going to want to make sure you double check to, to make sure you're filling in any necessary values. It may know that you want to put something in Slack, but it might not know what you wanna put in. So you might need to go in and select the right field, but it's gonna basically, allow you to start further into your pipeline. You're not starting from scratch. You're starting sort of with a skeleton. And that can help you support use cases like, a very common use case we see. I talked about making a change log. One of the other things people really like to automate is making a, a a backup from their production app to a, backup app that holds data for them. So that that way, the year's rolled over and I don't wanna have all of my previous year data in my live app, this is a way that you could set up an automation, using pipelines to pull their live data out and back it up to a to another application. This can be a great way if you wanna just make sure your reporting stays clean, your working processes stay clean, that kind of situation here. And similarly, the AI, knowing what you're looking for, will try to do the work of helping you fill in a lot of these fields, making it run faster for you. This can really all you kinda need to do anytime you're using AI tools, make sure you double check. It looks like the things you want, run a test on it, make sure it's giving you all this information you'd like. But it's a great way to tackle some of these common use cases because we have great frameworks for what they look like. And then lastly, one of the other things that can be helpful even if you're not starting a new pipe with pipeline, but you're still working on one, we've added suggestions. So when you're in a field, there's gonna you're gonna get a list of all the fields you could pull from. Suggestions will actually fill in ideas of what could be in there. So great examples, this was a body. It included not just fields, but also an opt suggestion on text. The AI will kind of do the work it can to help you figure out based on the notes you've made, based on the quest the prompts you've given, the pipeline, what kind of information you wanna fill in. This is a great opportunity just to think about, like, how do how do I use AI to help me build my pipelines? So that's just basically a quick run over on if you wanted to think about using AI as well. I see there are a couple of good questions. I'm definitely gonna hit those as I get to the q and a, but I'm just gonna finish up a quick little section first that's gonna be on some of the things that aren't directly in pipelines, but can be super helpful for some of your questions or the things that you wanna do. Some folks have already asked about, like, how do I know things like what pipelines are attached to my applications, or, how do I manage, like, someone left? I need to figure out, like, what what did they build and where is it. One of the things you have available to you is Connection Central. And Connection Central, unlike the big pipelines list that was at the top level, is actually built for the app admin in mind. Connection Central exists inside your application. If you go into your app settings and you open up your under your advanced, features, you'll see Connection Central as an option if your account has pipelines enabled. What that does is it actually provides you a list of the the current automation workflows, which would be pipelines or connected tables that are connected to your app. So especially helpful if you have a lot of tables in an application or a lot of workflows in an application, this will simplify it for you. You'll be able to see the name of every pipeline connected, whether or not it's running, if it's recently run into errors, and it'll also let you click into the resources section to give you the specifics of what that pipeline is changing. What tables does it impact? What fields does it impact? Or what fields does it reference? So this is a great way for if you know your company used pipelines in the past or someone else has used pipelines to catch up on what they're doing or just to give a quick audit and say, like, is everything running the way I expect it to in this application? Especially if you're finding yourself wondering, like, something happens automatically and I don't know how. This can help you figure out if there's a pipeline, kind of behind the scenes helping you do this. And then service accounts are what we were talking about a little bit earlier. They're a more secure way for you to share your pipeline build pipeline or even, app building responsibilities. Basically, what you can do is there's now a new option that unlike regular accounts, they can be accessed by a multiple authorized users. They let multiple build pipelines collaboratively. They still support things like SSO if you need it. They can help you maintain a detailed audit log. They allow you head to have API access. There's a lot of the powerful tools that Quickbase has available to folks where if you're at a larger organization or even just a busy organization, you might be worried about spreading that responsibility out and not being able to find it again. Service accounts can help you centralize what account is doing the changing. It's easier for you to track it, easier for you to share it. You basically add the these folks this person is almost like a user to your account. But in that user setup, you actually assign who else should be able to be that user. So I might have in this example, like, an accounting service account, which which is supposed to be anyone in accounting can use these permissions and build pipelines that are for for the accounting team. I could assign other people on the team to share this, and it becomes an option under their own user preferences in Quickbase to essentially, like, become the service account for a period of time. I jump into their seat. I can see the pipelines they've built. I can get access to the permissions that they have. And so this is a way to give and spread out a little bit of your building a bit more, but make it really easy to know, like, where did everything go. Because if you as an, the highest level admin, maybe you're the person who's really responsible for Quickbase is a little nervous about setting a bunch of other people free with pipelines permissions because you won't be able to find them all again. You can be like, everyone's gotta build under this service account that I have access to too, so I can come in and check and make sure that all the things are working the way they're supposed to. And if anyone's ever out sick, vacation, changed jobs, we got promoted, you know that they're all just there. It's a great way of making sure that you can track a lot of the the stuff that you are powering your work flows on. And so now we can move to the q and a section where there's plenty of time for us to kinda go over burning questions that folks have. So I'm just gonna go through the list. We've got a bunch of stuff from earlier, and we've got some stuff. So feel free to keep throwing questions in while I go through. I'll just get started on this, what we have here now. So let's see. Great question. So Pat asked, two of us support an app. The other person created the pipelines. How do I support them if that person moves, leaves, etcetera? You definitely probably wanna use Connection Central to help you understand, what the, basically, what what's already connected to your app. That'll let you know what pipelines exist already. And then from there, you might want to explore if your company wants to make use of a service account in Quickbase to to help you, like, centralize access to these pipelines. What's great is you can either make that decision today and start centralizing, or if that user ever leaves, you could potentially turn that user into a service account in the future if that works for your company. That can be really helpful if somebody does the lion's share of your integrations work and then they leave. You can say, like, hey. We need to turn this into a service account so it's more accessible for everybody. I see a question on, is there a way for us to export pipelines as a PDF, not as a YAML? I didn't cover it in here, but it's a great question. Essentially, on the back end, YAML is sort of the language that all of your, pipeline is stored in. There is an option if you ever want to recreate a pipeline to download essentially all of the the the ugly stuff on the back end and all of the language that supports your, your pipeline and reupload it. There's only an option to to export today, just the YAML. Great question. Just today. That's all there is. If there's something you really need, I would say, just putting it into our product feedback. Let's see what else do we have here. Someone asked similarly to what we've been talking about. If someone leaves the quick quick your your company and has created a pipeline, does the pipeline disappear? So good news, it doesn't disappear. Tricky part is because for every pipeline you assign permissions, you basically say I'm using, like, my credentials to build my pipelines. If I get denied from the account or my permissions to the account change, the pipeline might fail in the future. That's where it would be up to some of the folks who support your account to figure out what they wanna do. Like I said, there's the option of, like, service accounts where you could try to transition to a service account so you can get those pipelines back up and running. The other choice is anyone who's a realm admin has the option when they're in that my pipelines page to also see a little tiny tag that lets them change over to the accounts pipelines. They can find pipelines built by other folks on your account, and if need be, they can do the work of, helping transition them, to somebody new. Usually, you have to do that by downloading the YAML and reuploading it, depending on how it was built. So the pipelines will just go away. And if, for example, the expectation is just that person doesn't have access to a Quickbase anymore, you would just wanna make sure that you transition over any, like, active pipelines that you rely on. Let's see. Does a service account require its own seat or license? That's a really great question. Service accounts don't require their own seat or license once they're made. So you can like I said, in setting up a service account, you do have if you convert somebody who's an existing user, is realm admin, that that, basically, like, would take over that seat. They would be pumped up. Or if you create a new service account, it doesn't take a seat at all. So it this is this is meant to help you do a lot of, like, the managing of your accounts without having to worry about thinking them as, like, a whole separate user, because you always be signing in as like, I started as Evan, but then I could share that account, that that accounting permissions. They don't exist as a full user. They kind of exist as, like, a a set of credential I can borrow. I can borrow the pass. I don't get my own pass, essentially. So they don't just allow you to just full access to Quickbase for a a full number of people. They're just not an additional user. And then I see from Abigail, I have a pipeline that fits into it, fits in a date in the parent record when a date is updated in the child record. It does not clear the field in the parent record when the date is cleared in the child record. Is there where I can include this in my existing pipeline? I'll get back to you. It's a little bit more of a complicated bill. I can send you over one of the suggestions. You basically add another step after that that says, to clear out the value, just because, it's not specific or that that, if the value goes to blank on one to go blank on the other. It's just because, nulls are treated as, like, a slightly different or, like, a lack of data is treated slightly differently than a data change. But I can send you a little more information on that. And then do we have a pipeline solution to merge two PDF files, file attachments? Let's say I trigger them both. Still thinking of work or so yes. That's a so if you you have two file attachments in Quickbase itself and you're looking to try to basically take the file attachments themselves, merge them and get a new file attachment, that is not something I'm familiar with today that we can do. Most of my experience would be that you'd probably be writing something custom at that point. I didn't cover it in here because it's not necessarily considered a brand new getting started with pipelines level, but one of the channels available is the it's called the HTTP channel. What that lets you do is basically take advantage of all the good stuff that comes with being able to trigger based off of changes in Quickbase or look for values at a Quickbase with, APIs from other companies or other services. You can basically use pipelines to start you, but then build custom stuff on top of that. That definitely goes into the realm of where you need a developer or someone who just feels comfortable playing with APIs. But it allows you for, if you ever wanna integrate with a system that isn't one on our list and you have set, like, a developer or some experience, you can build something custom that will help you go to systems that we don't connect you today, but still get some of the goodness of being able to use that drag and drop builder and the help of, like, Quickbase on our side. So, essentially, it's old world you would have had to do if you completely written something in API and Quickbase had a third party thing that does the work of, like, checking systems for you and then write the code for the other system. Now you can rely on pipelines to help you get started, and you're just connecting the other side. So that's an option for folks who really wanna get creative. For the beginners, don't worry about that. It's just there for you if you ever wanted. And I see there's a question here that was on, is there, one on one opportunities to learn about this topic? It's a little advanced, what we're covering here for someone who's brand new to pipelines. So there is our Quickbase university, which is just, available for everybody that has some on demand topics that include a bunch of content on pipelines, that'll take you through sort of, like, elearning lessons on at your own pace on learning more about pipelines and going into the specifics of building one. They also include some example demos like we used today. For those who are really interested in getting more, we also have paid trainings available with instructors for smaller classes that will go through workshops with every with you that are also available on university. There's basically an e learning section and a live training section. The live training is just one of those ones you'd have to sign up for and does have a cost associated with it. If you have a service plan with Quickbase, it's also potential that your service panel help cover some of that. Yes. I'll give you the URL for our university so you can grab it. It's super easy to remember. It's university.quickbase.com, but you can also find it right here. Like I said, they do if you look down, there's an on demand training section and a live training section, and they'll list any of the upcoming sessions we have. They cover a ton of topics, and they're smaller class sizes. So, like, the intention there is really, like, when you have questions doing the work, doing the hands on stuff together, they will kinda coach you through it, whereas we're sort of running up on the topic overall. And I see here I also had a question on which QB class will help me if there's an API that is not on our list. So APIs, unfortunately, are, because they're so unique to each platform, we don't have a really comprehensive training on APIs. We have an API documentation available that explains how to use the Quickbase side of things, but you also have to find the documentation for the folks that you wanna connect with. So, like, being able to build those custom solutions involve a little bit of getting to know what the other platform supports. If you have something really specific in mind, sometimes we can help you know if if people have done it before. But, in general, it it is a little bit of a learning that goes outside of Quickbase itself. I I I I myself am daunted by going into too many APIs. I know a couple off the top of my head, but I they are they take a little bit of learning. And I see there's another question here on if I delete a parent record, can I use pipelines to delete the connected data from the child table? I currently have to manually yes. That is something that you can do. That is where you actually use that query step that I was talking about. We didn't use it today in the demo, but your trigger would be when a record is deleted, I would like to do a query on the child table and look for every record that has, the same value in their related parent table. So, for example, if I was doing companies and contacts, when I delete the company, I would query everyone on the contacts table for, for that same related parent record. And once I have that list, I could then run a request to delete the stuff on that list. You wanna be careful anytime you delete stuff just because you don't wanna delete things you don't intend. So I always recommend with those deletions that you you build, like, a test record or two and test things in a safer, situation first before you make sure you're deleting anything in the platform itself because you wanna make sure you keep your live data safe. Deletions just are a little bit trickier because once they're gone, you you wanna make sure you know how to get them back. But it is possible. That is something that folks will do. They're using examples of, like, you can go down several levels if you need to. You would just be using the query step that is available. And I included in our documents and that are linked here a bunch of stuff on, like, what can I do with Quickbase? What can I do with pipelines? There's a resource we have that goes over all the triggers and a bunch more use cases than what we covered here today. This was just really like a getting your toes wet on how could you get started with them. Yes. And it's a great idea to always have a backup copy to test it out in. I I heavily recommend, I recommend for everyone here, the Neptune app that I used for today's demo is available in our exchange. It's a great starter because it just has some some fake data in it that is, like that feels real. It's a great starter place for if you wanna play with pipelines because you can have that as, like, your testing ground and playground. It doesn't have anything that you care about, otherwise. So I have a couple more minutes if anyone has any other questions, but, otherwise, we're getting real close to the end of our session today. I'm just gonna make a few quick plugs that, you know, a lot of us feel like sometimes we're doing all these things on our own, but it doesn't have to be on your own. You always have the option to reach out to our support with for our technical support team, but also as well as the crew. It is our online forums and community that's available to everybody that is basically an opportunity for you to connect with other folks like you. People go there to ask questions and get help, even just advice, ask if, hey. I'm trying to do this thing. Has anyone else done it before? There's also a lot of other webinars, opportunities that we have host in our crew groups, which are, like, little interest groups around specific like, hey. We all have the same interest because we're all app admins or we're all realm admins for first time. We all wanna learn how to build pipelines. It's a great place to connect with other folks who share a lot of the same perspectives. So I definitely heavily recommend especially if you're interested in long term in pipelines, there is a pipelines focused crew group where occasionally folks will join and share pipelines that they built, share the the, like, these are ideas that I had, can I get some help? I definitely recommend it. And I saw Laura had the question of where is Exchange, where can I find this Neptune app? So remember from our demo where we hit that little waffle menu in the upper left hand corner? If you have app building permission in your account, one of the options there should just say Exchange. Or if you go to your my apps page where you can see, like, a list of all of your apps, there's a little download sample apps in the upper right hand corner. Either of those should take you to the exchange, and that'll let you just really quickly grab the the app that you're looking for, so that you can use it yourself. And we have tons of test, example apps in there. Yeah. If I would heavily recommend for everybody who's curious about starting and feels a little, flow mixed or a little, like, little tentative, don't worry about like, definitely give AI a try. The biggest thing is, like, you'd control when you turn a pipeline on. So you can always have AI give you a skeleton. You can look at it and decide, like, does this make any sense for me or do I need to make changes? It can be a great way just, like, visually see it before you build it. So thank you, everybody. I hope you all had a great time. If you have any further questions, like I said, you're always welcome to reach out to us and let us know if you need help through our through our technical support cases, or you can always just reach out and let us know if you need anything, in general. Thank you very much, and have a great rest of your day.