I’m getting comfortable with individual actions, but I’m still not totally confident about how data flows through a story. Sometimes I’m not sure which output to reference or how to structure a formula to pull out exactly what I need. How do people think about data passing in Tines, and are there any patterns that make it cleaner?
This is actually one of those concepts that clicks best once you see the pattern. Every action in a story emits an event when it runs, and downstream actions can reference the output of any action that came before them using data path formulas. The basic syntax is action_name.body.path.to.value, where the action name is the display name of the action you’re pulling from and the path reflects the structure of its output.
The easiest way to get comfortable with this is to run an action, look at its event output, and then reference specific fields from it in the next action. You can use the events panel to inspect the full output and build your formulas from there rather than guessing at the structure.
A few things that help keep data passing clean: name your actions descriptively (because those names become part of every formula that references them), use the pill editor to autocomplete paths instead of typing them manually, and use Event Transform actions when you need to reshape data before passing it along.
The formula documentation covers data referencing syntax in detail, and the Builder: Core learning path on Tines University walks through this concept step by step.