Use Metadata (additional data) in Workflows

💡 Learn how to use metadata in your workflows and retrieve it in output of your workflows.

What are metadata?

Metadata refers to any additional information you want to pass in input of your workflow and want to use in your workflow and/or retrieve in the results.

How does it work?

If you want to pass additional information in your workflow, you need to start from the upload of a CSV file.

Make sure that the column(s) name(s) of your file matches the required input(s) on the platform.

Other columns that are not required in input of the workflow will be considered as “metadata”. (e.g. this spreadsheet that we use to build our input to find people in new positions - this is a basic find leads with email from lead search workflow and the only required field is the sales_navigator_profile_search_url. However, the extra fields such as the campaign id or the owner’s email will be used to map them directly to the right campaign and owner later in our outbound import workflow).

When configuring your workflow, you can use at any moment on a manual mapping the values you uploaded as “meta” by passing the key as meta.key_name (e.g. meta.linkedin_profile_url).

Use case example

Here we want to update the linkedin_people_profile of the people we have in our CRM Hubspot:

In input of the 1. Google Search step, I uploaded a CSV sheet with the following columns:

• google_search_query → the required input for the step to work
• hubspot_people_id → the metadata enabling me to update the person in my CRM

We have something like this:

On the third step 3. Update Contact Hubspot, the hubspot_people_id key will enable us to reference the people we want to update.

Since this key is not given by the workflow itself, I need to use the metadata I input in the first step by passing meta.hubspot_people_id in the CRM mapping.

To do that, instead of selecting a mapping value coming from the workflow, I need to enable manual mapping:

Here the section turned into a text area.

In the text area, put meta.hubspot_people_id as a mapping value.

How to retrieve metadata in your workflow’s output?

Before Q4/23, you could pass metadata in input and retrieve it in output in a “meta” column which was an array.

Now you can activate the Metadata Iterator option, which will split each metadata into single columns in your output results.

On the launcher settings, click Configure Output data, then enable the Inputs Meta Mapping option: