The power of parameters

A parameter is a special placeholder field that allows you to reference a data input. Parameters are incredibly helpful when creating one-to-many communications where you want to create a template that works for a frequent scenario (like an email for reporting a bug), but still incorporate some personalization (someone’s name, for instance).

There are two important things to know when using parameters:

1. How to create parameters
2. How to insert parameters.

How to create parameters

We offer four different out-of-the-box parameter fields (assignee name, assigner name, workflow link, assignment link), but you can also create parameters using a form step. Any field you include in a form step will create a parameter available for use on any step where parameters are supported (see list below).

Let’s look at an example: our Report a Bug to Qatalog workflow.

The scenario is we want to create a workflow for reporting a bug to the Qatalog team. To do this, we need to ensure our workflow does the following things:

1. Allows the Qatalog user to detail the bug they observed.
2. This feedback is delivered to the Qatalog team.
3. This feedback is delivered in a way that’s easy to read and action.

To do this, I’m going to create a form step that includes questions about the bug that our engineering team would like to know:

And then I’ll create an email step (or a Slack message, Trello card, Asana task, or JIRA incident!) to email our engineering team that leverages the form step’s answers by inserting their corresponding parameters:

The end result is an incredibly straightforward process for anyone to report their bug, and a clean, uniform email that includes all of the information our engineering team needs to investigate the bug:

How to insert parameters

Once you’ve created your parameters, you can insert them by clicking on the lightning bolt icon in a parameter-supporting field.

Gif of where and how to insert a parameter in a text step.

You’ll see the parameter lightning bolt in the bottom right of steps that support it. For your reference, the following step types support parameters:

• Text
• Approval
• Email
• Slack
• Asana
• Trello
• JIRA