Text vs Lists
Text and lists are the two fundamental data types in Gumloop. Let's start by understanding the difference betweent the two.
What is an Output?
Every node returns outputs, individual pieces of data that you can reference throughout your workflow.
Say you retrieve one Slack message from the Slack reader node used as a trigger. You’ll get multiple outputs: the Slack message itself, the sender’s name, the ID of the message. What’s important to remember is that every one of those outputs is text.
Same goes for grabbing an event from your calendar using the Google calendar node. You’ll get event name, start time, event ID etc. One calendar event, multiple text outputs.
What are lists?
So far, we’ve covered examples where you pull one slack message, one calendar event, or one google sheet value - which returns multiple text outputs.
Often, you don’t want to pull just one of something, you want to retrieve many—give me all my events from today or all messages from #general from the last week. This is where Lists come into play.
When you retrieve many of something, the outputs become “Lists” instead of “Text”. Just like before, you receive multiple outputs (one for Message, Channel Name, ThreadID, sender, etc.) except now the output is a List of text values, as opposed to one single text value.
In the next lesson, we’ll cover the difference in how Gumloop treats text and lists in your automations.
