Machine Attributes to Variable in Automations

Hello,
I’m reaching out to share a potential enhancement idea for working with automations triggered by machines on your platform.

Currently, when automations are triggered by machines, exporting and importing these automations can be quite tedious because machine attributes need to be re-mapped manually. To address this, our team has adopted a systematic workaround: we add an “Update Data” block at the beginning of each automation to store machine attribute values into variables. By doing this, we can reference these variables throughout the automation without having to map each machine attribute repeatedly.

While this workaround helps streamline the process, it would be incredibly helpful if there were a dedicated block or functionality—similar to the “Get Table Record” block—that allows users to retrieve all machine attributes and store them directly into variables in one step.

I’ve attached a screenshot illustrating how our current workaround looks in practice. I believe this feature would significantly improve usability and save time for teams managing machine-triggered automations.

Thank you for considering this suggestion, and I’d be happy to provide additional context or examples if needed. I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Hi Richard,

Thank you for posting - acknowledging the pain points around Importing and Exporting Automations that work with Machines.

We have some time dedicated this quarter to think about easier content sharing including Import/Export improvements.

I will pass along this idea to “Save Configuration” (e.g. Machine Attributes) as an intermediate improvement. Ideally we’d find a treatment that sets us up for a good long term and generalizable solution.

For some additional context: what’s your goal with Importing and Exporting? Are you using this to share Automations, validate in Prod/Dev, or something else? Asking this to understand how often you have to carry this out and to inform the wider content sharing discovery.

  • Olga
1 Like

Indeed, we are using export/import of automations to validate functions in a Dev instance and to export and use it in Prod instance. Our goal with export/importing automations is to prevent from copy manually each logic bloc from one instance to another.
Also, this function ‘Save Configuration’ can be usefull for cases when automation is triggered within a short interval between two consecutive triggers. An example that we have in our instance is an automation that can be triggered twice in a short time frame, so second run is triggerd before than the first run is finished. In this case first run might reference machine attributes that have already been updated by the second event that triggers the automation, leading to inconsistencies.
Best regards,
Richard