Lists & Loop mode
Nodes perform one action at a time. When you pass a text value to a node, it executes once - using that text value. When you pass a list to a node (that has 10 items) the node will execute 10 times - once for each value of text in that node. Let’s understand how that impacts your workflows in Gumloop.
Text as Input
Let’s say you’re working with a text input—a new row from your Google sheet, a scraped website.
When you pass that value to the next node, it will run once and process that value. Give an AI Categorizer node your latest review and it can tell you whether that review is positive or negative. Give that same review to an Ask AI node and it can return a summary.
In most cases, provide a text input to a node and that node will return text.
List as Input
In Gumloop, you can also work with lists—all of your reviews, recent messages from Slack, a list of contacts.
When you pass a list value to a node, it will automatically set the node to Loop Mode. This is because lists contain multiple text inputs - and nodes can only perform one task at a time.
With Loop Mode on, the node works through your list item by item. Give an AI Categorizer node a batch of customer reviews to categorize as positive or negative, and it sends back a matching list of categories, one for each review.
Looping is perfect when you want a list output the same size as your input list (10 reviews, 10 sentiments). But often you want one output for a list of inputs (one report of all 10 reviews). We’ll cover that in the next lesson!
