linkWhat are automations and how are they useful?
Services like IFTTT and Pipedream allow you to connect Amplenote to other apps and services, in a way that can automate common, repetitive actions or integrate features from multiple apps.
The most common type of automation you can build will have a "Trigger and Action" architecture, that is you can make your automation run when something happens inside an app (the "trigger") and do something in a different app (the "action").
Note that both IFTTT and Pipedream are third-party services and not related to Amplenote. The creation and usage of automations might be subject to an extra fee, based on how frequently they are triggered (although as of March 2023, both services provide limited, but free functionality).
Finally, note that currently Amplenote only registers "Actions" and no "Triggers". If you would like to use data triggers from Amplenote, please email us about it/create a feature request for it 🙏.
linkHow to set up an IFTTT integration
In IFTTT, an automation is called an "Applet". You can create an Applet from scratch or choose from one of the Applets that the community published so far.
To create an Applet from scratch, navigate to https://ifttt.com/create. First, choose a trigger, or a "If This" step:
"New file in your folder" will make our Applet trigger whenever a new file is created in a particular folder in your Google Drive.
Triggers usually require some configuration. In this case, we need to log in with our Google Drive account and give IFTTT the necessary permissions. Then, we need to specify the name of the folder that we want to monitor using this Applet.
For different apps and triggers, the list of possible configurations will be different.
The second part of the Applet is the "Action" or the "Then That" step.
In this step, you should choose Amplenote from the list, and then choose the appropriate Action. In this example, we will create a task:
The parameters for this action lets you configure the destination of the task as well as the contents of the task.
The "Text" property will be the visible contents of the task that you create, while "Description" will be the added as a Rich Footnote applied to that text.
You can also add a URL or an image to the Rich Footnote that will be created.
"Ingredients" are the most powerful tool to configure the content that gets added to Amplenote. An "ingredient" is a field that gets pulled automatically from the trigger. In this case, since we are connecting to Google Drive, some useful ingredients we can access are the name of the file or metadata assigned to it. Use the "Add ingredient" button in the IFTTT interface to insert these variables:
Note the usage of line breaks <br>, to enable us to format text on multiple lines.
To finish creating your Applet, press "Create Action" at the bottom of the screen and then enable your Applet.
linkHow to set up a Pipedream integration
In Pipedream, set up your account and create a new workflow. The trigger, just like in IFTTT, will be from a newly created Google Docs, where we want to get the public link inside a task. To add such a trigger, we will need to use the Google Drive: New Files (Instant) trigger, and it will track any newly created files in the selected folder, in this example, the My Drive folder.
Once you have connected your Google account and chosen the drive folder, click on the "Create Source" button. A prompt screen will ask you to trigger an event.
Go to your Google Drive and create a new Google Docs in the chosen folder. The screen should change, and prompt you to choose an event. As we want the link to the newly created document, open the event and click on the "more" blue button and copy the path of the webViewLink property. Click on continue once you're done.
You can now add a step, which is going to be to create a task in Amplenote. After connecting with your Amplenote account, you can select a note in the "Note ID" field and, on the "Nodes" field, you can type out what should go in the task. Keep in mind that the Node needs something in this format: {"type":"check_list_item","content":[{"type":"paragraph","content":[{"type":"link","attrs":{"href":"{{steps.trigger.event.webViewLink}}"},"content":[{"type":"text","text":"New file from Google Drive"}]}]}]}. For more information, check out Amplenote's API docs
Click on the blue "Test" button and you should see a success message once it completes.
Now all that's needed is to deploy your integration!