Global Variables
Globals are shared values that can be referenced in flows, as well as broadcasts and campaigns, within your account referenced by @globals.value_name. They allow you to create a value once and use it repeatedly without having to reenter the value. Likewise, globals make updating a shared value much easier. Rather than manually changing a value everywhere it's used in your account, simply update the value found in your 'Globals' page.
Say you have 5 different webhooks in your account that all use the same Airtable API Authorization key. By saving that key as a global variable, you can easily reference the key without having to look it up in your Airtable account every time you create a webhook.
We've got a flow where we want to retrieve data from a table in our Airtable account multiple times. This means we'll need to use more than one Call Webhook action, and each of those will need to be configured using the API Authorization key from Airtable. To avoid having to look up the key for each configuration, we'll create a global to save time.
Go to your Flows page, then scroll down to to the " @ globals".
Here, you'll find your Globals page where you can create and manage your global variables. Click "New global" to create:
To create a new variable, click the 'Create Global' button. Choose a name, enter the value and click 'Create'. For our API key example, the value is the same value that we'd enter for the 'Authorization' header in our Call Webhook action in our flow.
Note that by clicking on the 'uses' link next to each global variable on your 'Globals' page, you can see every place your global is used.
After creating the shared API key global, we can reference it in all of our new Call Webhook actions in our Airtable flow.
When we create each new Call Webhook node, we don't need to enter the text value of the Authorization header.
We can instead simply reference the value using the global variable we've created using @globals.api_key. Recall that we named the variable API Key when we created the global earlier.
That's it! For any other webhook where we would also use the same Airtable API Authorization key, we don't need to look it up. We can easily enter the global instead.
Note that globals can only be edited or updated within your Globals page and not within flows.
Questions? Send us a message via the support widget in the bottom right corner of your browser.
Say you have 5 different webhooks in your account that all use the same Airtable API Authorization key. By saving that key as a global variable, you can easily reference the key without having to look it up in your Airtable account every time you create a webhook.
How it works
We've got a flow where we want to retrieve data from a table in our Airtable account multiple times. This means we'll need to use more than one Call Webhook action, and each of those will need to be configured using the API Authorization key from Airtable. To avoid having to look up the key for each configuration, we'll create a global to save time.
Create the global variable
Go to your Flows page, then scroll down to to the " @ globals".
Here, you'll find your Globals page where you can create and manage your global variables. Click "New global" to create:
To create a new variable, click the 'Create Global' button. Choose a name, enter the value and click 'Create'. For our API key example, the value is the same value that we'd enter for the 'Authorization' header in our Call Webhook action in our flow.
Note that by clicking on the 'uses' link next to each global variable on your 'Globals' page, you can see every place your global is used.
Use the global in a flow
After creating the shared API key global, we can reference it in all of our new Call Webhook actions in our Airtable flow.
When we create each new Call Webhook node, we don't need to enter the text value of the Authorization header.
We can instead simply reference the value using the global variable we've created using @globals.api_key. Recall that we named the variable API Key when we created the global earlier.
That's it! For any other webhook where we would also use the same Airtable API Authorization key, we don't need to look it up. We can easily enter the global instead.
Note that globals can only be edited or updated within your Globals page and not within flows.
Questions? Send us a message via the support widget in the bottom right corner of your browser.
Updated on: 19/06/2023
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