This article will describe some basic information that you need to know about configuring most connectors.
Record Data
You will hear the term "record data" throughout many Connect articles. This refers to the data that is included in the records that are moving through your workflows. For example, a record may consist of a Contact's first name, last name, company, mobile phone number and email. This is one "record" with 5 pieces of "record data". Each of those five pieces of record data can be used in Connectors. Some examples include:
- You can evaluate the "Mobile Phone" field to see if a value is present. If not, then it may be routed down a different path in your workflow to let you know that you have incomplete data. Or if the value exists, you can pass the record to a connector such as Twilio to send an SMS message.
- You can use the "Email" value to perform a lookup in one of your systems to see if you already have that contact stored.
- You can pass the "Company" value through one of our connectors such as InsideView to enrich the data.
Available record data
As a record moves through various paths on your workflow, it will be available to use in any connector in its connected path. In the example below, records are split based on whether or not the data includes a Mobile number. If not, the data is written to an Eloqua CDO. If a Mobile is available, it continues to a Twilio step where an SMS message is sent and the status is retrieved. When writing data to the Eloqua CDO (in the flow on the right), you will not have any Twilio information that can be written to the CDO because that data is in a different path.
Viewing available Record Data
When configuring connector fields, click the button on the field you are looking to configure or use the hotkey Ctrl+space to view available record data. Records may enter your workflow with a certain set of record data fields and that list of available fields will continue to grow as it passes through connectors. For example, a record may enter with only first name, last name and company. A connector that performs Email Validation will append new data to the record such as the Email Validation Status and Confidence value. Then an Enrichment connector may add information about the Company such as its Number of Employees, Sector, and many more fields.
As the list of available Record Data fields grows, you may need to utilize the Search capabilities that exist. After using Ctrl+space, you can start typing using either the name of the field (i.e. Company, First Name, etc.) or using the Connector Name that produced the value. For example, if Fresh Address was used to Validate the Email, you can type FreshAddress and it will show all fields that were added from the FreshAddress connector.
In this example, data is entering the workflow with only 2 values - Company and Email.
When you open the FreshAddress connector, you will see that only those 2 fields are available to select from.
However, when you get to the InsideView connector, you will have data from the HTTP Trigger and the results from the FreshAddress lookup.
And by the time you get to the Eloqua step, you now have data from HTTP, FreshAddress, InsideView to choose from.