Replace an item

Triggers and actions can be replaced. The most common scenario is to replace an older version of a trigger/action with a newer one.

To demonstrate how to do this and the limitations of replacement functionality, consider this example automation:

In the above example, article descriptions from CNBC are capitalized, then any email addresses are extracted from those descriptions.

Let's say we want to instead perform the same functionality for CNN articles.

Right click on the CNBC trigger and choose Replace:

We know we want to use CNN, so select the first option to find the app:

Find and select CNN:

The CNN app tile will overal the existing CNBC tile. Choose the sole CNN trigger:

Then save the trigger to perform the replacement:

Now the CNBC trigger has been replaced with the CNN trigger:

Even better, the mapping in the Capitalize action is now updated to use the "Article Description Plaintext" trigger output field now coming from the CNN trigger:

This only works because the CNBC and CNN triggers both emit the same "Article Description Plaintext" output field.

Let's see what happens when output field names don't match, by replacing the Capitalize action with Uppercase.

As before, use the right-click menu on Capitalize and replace it with Uppercase:

Here we can see that the editor inserted the field mapping from the trigger into the Uppercase action, which is good!

But trouble is to be found if we inspect the extract email action, which was using the output from the Capitalize action:

Here we can see that the extract email action is expecting an output field named "Capitalized value", but the output from the Uppercase action is named "Uppercase value":

If we had not noticed this, when the automation would execute it would have used an empty value. We need to manually swap out the previous mapping with the output from the uppercase action:

Now the automation will work as expected.