What is the “List Trigger?" This Used to be Called Loop, Are List and Loop the Same Thing?

Introduction:

In the world of automation, efficiency and precision are key factors that drive success. One of the fundamental tools that streamline automation processes is the "List" trigger. But wait, isn't this trigger similar to the well-known concept of "Loop"? Let's dive into the core differences and functionalities of the "List" trigger to unlock its full potential.

Understanding the List Trigger:

The list trigger stands out as a specialized feature that enhances the functionality of your automation tasks. It introduces a unique capability to loop over specific steps, guiding the automation flow with precision and control. Imagine a slider at the top guiding the sequence of steps, allowing your automation to iterate through data seamlessly.

Optimizing Data Processing:

When integrating a Google sheet or any data source with the list trigger, you have the flexibility to define the number of rows processed in each iteration. This granular control ensures that your automation runs efficiently, handling chunks of data at a time. By setting the loop parameters, you can orchestrate the flow of operations to match your specific requirements.

Iterative Automation in Action:

A practical example illustrates the power of the list trigger in action. Whether you are scraping data, processing addresses, or handling diverse datasets, the list trigger simplifies the iterative process. By repeating predefined steps for each data row, you can execute complex automation tasks with ease and accuracy.

Expanded Possibilities:

The list trigger is not limited to basic row-based actions. It opens up a realm of possibilities for handling extensive datasets, performing follow-up flows, and managing pagination seamlessly. Whether you are exploring messaging flows, handling scraped data, or navigating through multiple pages, the list trigger offers a versatile solution.

Enhancing Workflow Efficiency:

To optimize your automation workflow further, fine-tune the list trigger settings to control the number of iterations and define the starting row for each run. By customizing these parameters, you can tailor the automation process to match the specific demands of your project, ensuring consistent and reliable results.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the "List" trigger emerges as a powerful asset in the automation toolkit, offering a structured approach to handling data processing and iteration. By distinguishing it from the traditional concept of "Loop" and understanding its unique functionalities, you can elevate your automation projects to new heights of efficiency and effectiveness.

A list trigger is a special type of trigger that adds some extra functionality to your automation. This is the ability to loop over some steps with this slider at the top here. The way that this slider works is it tells us, let's say that I made this go here, for example, is that the automation is going to run step one, run step two, step three, et cetera, run through all of its steps.

When it gets to step five, it's going to restart from step three with the next row of data. So what that looks like is, is if I have a Google sheet like this and I have all of my rows here, when I connect it to my list trigger, I'm specifying how many rows I want to use at once. So here I say three rows.

So when my automation runs, it's going to run with these three rows the first time and it'll increment down it's down the list unless we tell it not to. When this automation is triggered to run, the first loop is only going to use this first row of data, so row two. So it's going to go to the profile URL, which is this, slash followers, and it's going to go and do all of the logic I told it to do there.

When it gets to step five, it's going to go all the way back to step one, but with the next row of data. So now it's going to use this user's profile and go handle doing that for this user. So the list trigger is a really good way to work through a bunch of data that you may have scraped or a bunch of data that you have.

This isn't much of like a on new row added. I want to do something. This is, I have 10, 000 rows I want to loop over. And like, I guess just to give you guys more examples of this, um, it's just when you want to loop things. So in this example, I have Me looping over zip codes, me looping over addresses, me looping over, uh, this all got messed up.

I think this was me scraping every app that Zapier has. Um, that this is what the looping trigger is meant to do. It's meant to go over a bunch of data that you may have, uh, and repeat those steps in some order for each row of data. There's a couple extra steps that you'll want to look at when you get in here, such as these ones that I explained a little bit earlier, saying the next row to run and the amount of times you want to loop.

So this is set to loop three times and it's running on row eight right now. So it will grab these. Three rows of data. If I was to click play steps, the next row to run is now going to be 11 because I'm not telling it to stop the row from incrementing each run. This is how we're able to work down this list.

This is really popular for following flows, messaging flows, et cetera. All of these, where you have a bunch of data here. Probably that you scraped that now you're looking to use in another automation. The list trigger is also a really easy way to handle pagination. An example of that is if we wanted to scrape, um, yellow pages, for example, right here, I'll build this automation quickly with us so we can see what this looks like.

I can click new automation web, not on this one, because in this example, I'm not using cookies. And then we're going to use the list trigger to handle pagination.

So first URL is going to be going straight to yellow pages. So I'll paste that there. And then I'm going to record a type step dentist, and then I'm not going to change the city right now for this example, I'll just record a click step of clicking the find button next. I'm going to scrape a list. And I'm going to go down to where all of the businesses started.

So right here, and I'll scrape all of these and I'm not going to go through a ton of this. Just basic example of scraping. Then what we want to do is we want to record a click step of the next page button at the bottom here. And this bar is kind of in the way. This will probably give us a suggested step, actually, when we click this.

So we can deny that. And now let's record a click step of that next page button. Since that was very annoying, blocking our bar, we could move the bar to the top, but since it was completely covering it, I couldn't do that. And now this is a very simple way for us to scrape all of these pages using the list trigger.

The way that this automation works obviously is go to yellowpages. com type dentist, click the find button, and then we're scraping the list of results from this page. Then after scraping, we click the next button. So what we need to do is we need to repeat this scrape every time we click next. So to do that, we can set up a list trigger by clicking here and then select list.

And then we're going to specify the amount of times we want to loop. Since there's five pages, I'm going to enter five. And then I'll click continue and now we need to adjust our slider so that it only loops the steps. I want it to let me dismiss these really quick. So we do not want to go to yellow pages every single time.

We do not want to retype dentist every single time. And we do not want to re click find every time we're scraping inside of yellow pages. So let me pull this and we do just to show you. We want to scrape after we get to this page. If we were looping over a Google sheet or something, and we had a different category, we were searching our loop might start from the yellow pages, search that way it goes, dentists, electricians, et cetera, but not in this use case.

So What we want to do is we want to make sure that after we click find, we repeat these two steps. A bunch of times we scrape a list, we click next, we scrape a list, we click next. So that's all we need to drag our list to be. I'm going to drag this all the way to the right and this all the way to step four.

Now, what this automation will do is go to yellow pages, and Type dentist, click find, scrape a list, click next, then it's going to go back to step four, scrape a list, click next, back to step four, five times because we specified five in that example there.