What's new
in Parabola?

With the initial release of Parabola Tables, your Flow evolved into a home for your data.

Today, you and your teammates can use collaborative Table Views to better understand the output of your Flows and create richer, sharable reports.

To hone in on the exact results you need, filter or sort your data, and then save as a custom view. You can label saved views and apply color themes or emphasize specific columns.

Read about these feature on the blog!

We’re honored to announce that Parabola is a launch partner in Webflow’s new App Marketplace, announced yesterday at Webflow Conf 2022. You may remember when we launched our Webflow integrations in 2020, and now Webflow users can connect to Parabola directly from the Webflow Marketplace!

Parabola is the best way to populate your CMS with data and dynamically keep it up to date. Here are some automations to get you started.

Have you ever tried to open a Flow, only to get kicked out because someone else already had it open? It can be such a drag…

Well, no more.

As of today, teammates can access a Flow simultaneously!

Whenever a Flow is opened by multiple Editors, the first user will retain edit access, and all others will get a read-only experience. If Parabola detects any changes to the Flow while you’re in the read-only experience, you will be alerted and prompted to refresh.

We hope this enables you to collaborate even more closely on Flows, and we’re so excited about the promise of a truly multiplayer experience.

Today, we’re excited to announce Parabola Tables: a brand-new way to view, share, and explore the data your Flows create!

Your Parabola Flows already centralize all of your processes and logic. Now, you can also publish the output of your Flows directly in Parabola.*

The new “Send to Parabola Table” step enables you to create reports that are easily shareable with your entire team. Tables created in a Flow appear on the Live view, and are visible to anyone who is a viewer on your flow.

You can also use data from those tables in any of your other Flows with the “Pull from Parabola Table” step, which unlocks new ways of linking Flows and data sets together.

Check out this video to see this all in action.

Use Parabola Tables to create and share simple reports, dashboards, and custom data sets between Flows. Read more on our blog about how to leverage tables, and what you can to look forward to!

^{*At launch, you can use unlimited Parabola Tables at no extra charge to your team. After a beta period, we'll move to a usage-based model for Parabola Tables data storage. (You will not be charged retroactively for usage during the beta period.)}

Pull from Redshift and Postgres steps now support the use of common table expressions! Use CTEs to make your queries more manageable and easier to read.

Learn more about CTEs in the Postgres documentation here.

‍

We’ve combined the Select columns, Rename columns, and Reorder columns steps into one, super powerful step: the Edit columns step! Now, from this single step, you can:

• Keep or remove columns
• Guarantee that selected columns are kept even if the input source removes them
• Change the names of your columns
• Update the order of your columns

Note: If you are using the Select columns, Rename columns, or Reorder columns steps in older Flow, they will continue to work. Going forward, you will need to use the new Edit columns to make those column changes.

To read more about this step, check out our Edit columns How To.

We now support three new data sources in Parabola: Looker, Snowflake, and Amazon Seller Central!

Looker, Snowflake, and Amazon Seller Central are key to mission-critical business reporting. Looker and Snowflake are essential repositories for storing and accessing data, and Amazon merchants rely on Amazon Seller Central reports to manage their businesses. Now, instead of jumping between tools, you can connect these three data sources into your Parabola Flows!

For more information about each:

1. Looker‍
2. Snowflake‍
3. Amazon Seller Central

‍

These integrations are available to customers on our Advanced Plan. Please contact us or schedule a call if you’re interested in them for your team!

Get more insight into certain API errors. Working with APIs can be difficult, which is why we've improved our error messaging for JSON and GraphQL syntax errors. In the past, you may have seen an error that your JSON or GraphQL syntax was invalid, but the error did not give any other information. Now, in all of the API steps, Parabola will show you the request that caused the error, which row it is on, and a small message about where to look for the character that caused the issue.

We've updated how the Live View of flows look to be easier to read and use, and to make way for some future additions to these pages.

Updates include a larger title, some information below it about who owns the flow, when it was created, and the status of the last run.

Speaking of runs, those have been moved to a panel next to the preview window, and scheduling has been collapsed into a section above them.

Keep your eyes out for some releases later that will really turn the tables on what this page is used for!

Flow email settings are now saved for each editor on a flow. Anyone who has edit access (via individual permissions or team permissions) on a flow can choose what kind of emails they want from that flow. You can choose to receive an email anytime the flow runs, just when it fails or pauses, or no emails at all (which is a new option!).

Access these settings from the settings view of a flow, or the settings modal from the Flows home page.

Flows that have the Pull from Email Attachment step and are triggered by inbound emails now can take advantage of a queue. If your flow is running when another email comes in, we will queue up that email to be processed in the next run. This is the same behavior that flows triggered by webhooks use.

The queue has been upgraded to allow any flow to queue up to 200 pending runs before any new runs are ignored.

Many APIs use OAuth2.0 to authenticate, which can be difficult to set up. The OAuth2.0 form (used by all three API steps) now has streamlined settings, along with a visual update. The simple version requires fewer fields to be configured and covers most APIs. The form also lets you toggle between the new simple version and the full custom version. When switching, values will be ported back and forth between the two forms.

We’ve made two new updates to the Filter Rows step that we think we add even more power to your flows.

Add multiple criteria to single filter

In the past, if you had a large list of criteria that you had to filter against, such as email domains to remove, you needed to add an individual rule for each criteria.

Now, the contains, not contains, is equal to, and is not equal to filter operations will accept multiple criteria fields.

‍

Use merge tags in a filter criteria

Previously, when you needed to compare one column to another, and the filter based on that comparison, you would use an Insert If Else Column step to perform the comparison, followed by a Filter Rows step to then filter based on that comparison (also creating an extra temporary column in the process).

Now, the Filter Rows step will accept merge tags. Enter any column name, wrapped in {curly braces}, to compare columns inside of a filter.

‍

‍

Introducing Card Templates!

You can now build cards with steps and relevant documentation, and then save them as templates for anyone on your team to use. Card Templates are great for sharing common data sources, re-using parts of Flows, sharing documentation, and keeping Flows up to date across your team.‍

Some key things about Card Templates:

You can save any card as a Card Template to the sidebar. When a card is saved, you and everyone on your team can find it there and pull it into any Flow.

You can choose whether or not to shared authorized steps on a Card Template (think authorized Google Sheets, Shopify, database steps). This lets you more easily share team logins.

Once you pull in a Card Template to your flow, you are free to make any edits to it that you need. Consider Templates as a jumping off point!

Authors of a Card Template can push new update from any instance of that card. Anyone using that Card Template will be notified in their flow that the Template has been updated so that they can compare the new version to their current version before updating

Read more about Card Templates here!

We are thrilled to announce the launch of team folders! You can now create folders to easily organize and work on Flows with your team. Read about all of the changes in detail here.

We also completely redesigned the Flows page to make it easier to find, organize, and manage your Flows. What was previously one page is now three distinct spaces:

1. Home - this is your default landing page, and lists the Flows updated most recently
2. My Flows - this is where your personal Flows live. This includes your private Flows, Flows you created and shared with specific people, and Flows that were shared with you directly.
3. Team Flows - this is where your team Flows live. Here you can group Flows into folders (and sub-folders)! Flows in the team space are shared with your entire team, meaning anyone can find and access them.

You’ll also notice that Flows are now displayed in rows, designed to make it easier to identify the Flow you’re looking for:

To get started, we recommend creating folders and moving Flows into your team space. This will enable you to create a shared organizational system for your entire team, and make it much easier to find and collaborate on Flows.

There’s lots more to come, so please send us your feedback and ideas!

‍

We've updated the Enrich with an API and Send to an API steps to include an Error Handling settings section.

With these new settings, you can enable your API steps to pass through data even if some of the API requests fail. Modifying this setting will add new error handling columns to your dataset reporting on the status of those API calls.

Take your flows to the next level by routing rows with errors into branches to alert someone on your team about the errors, retry them, or anything else. Read more about it here.

Give your cards some personality and identity by adding emoji!

As a bonus, if you type in an emoji as the first part of a title, it will automatically be shifted into the emoji slot.

Placing steps into cards is even easier now!

We’ve improved our drop targets so that its easier to place steps inside cards. Cards are a great way to organize portions of your flows and leave notes and documentation.

The team is working on some more awesome features that will further build off of cards with steps inside of them, so stay tuned.

‍

All API steps now offer the option to select the request type POST (GraphQL). With this request, you can insert your Graph query directly into the request body to specify the exact data that you’d like to pull from an API.

This enhancement makes it far easier to request data from popular GraphQL API endpoints such as Shopify, Facebook, and Monday.com along with many others.

Reference our How To docs for additional information.

We're making it easier for you and your teammates to share your Parabola Flows. Three big updates are launching today:

1. Flow Editors: until today, Flows could have two different types of editors – "Admins" and "Collaborators." We've simplified these into one role, called "Editor." Editors can edit any part of a Flow, including sharing or deleting the Flow itself.
2. Flow Viewers: you can now add users to your Flows as Viewers! Viewers get read-only access to the entire Flow, and cannot make any changes.
3. Managing permissions: to review or change who has access to a Flow, simply click the "Share" button in the top-right corner.

For all the details, check out our How To guide.

We're thrilled to announce that you can (finally) undo and redo changes in your Flows!‍

Any edits you make during a Flow-building session can now be quickly reverted. That includes adding, removing, or repositioning steps, updating step settings, changing step connections, and so on!

To use, simply type those keyboard commands you know so well:

• Undo: ⌘+Z (on macOS) and Ctrl+Z (on Windows)
• Redo: ⌘+Y or Shift+⌘+Z (on macOS) and Ctrl+Y or Shift+Ctrl+Z (on Windows)

Or, click on the arrows now located in the Flow navigation bar.

To undo or redo changes in step settings, you can use the same keyboard commands, or click the arrows at the top of the window.

We released several updates to our Flow builder navigation bar, so your workflow can be faster, clearer, and more collaborative.

• Consolidated run actions (like “Update Live” or “Fix 1 issue”) make it clear what state a Flow is in, and whether it can be run
• Reorganized Flow actions keep your building tools in the same place
• Refreshed nav interface and interactions, from the “Home” button all the way to a new Parabola menu

Two new database integrations bring Parabola even closer to your data.

Our Pull from PostgreSQL integration now has its matching half! Use the Send to PostgreSQL step to automatically insert or update data in a PostgreSQL database.

We've also released a fresh integration with MS SQL Server, Microsoft's popular relational database product. Use the Pull from MS SQL and Send to MS SQL steps to create flows that connect directly to your database.

The two new Destination steps (Send to...) use connection pooling to drastically increase their speed. We extended this improvement to the existing Send to MySQL step, as well.

We've upgraded 8 of the most used, and sometimes slowest, transform steps! Most should run about 15x faster than they used to, which means if a step used to take 1 minute to finish, it will now only take 4 seconds.

• The Merge duplicate rows step, Remove duplicate rows step, and Insert row Numbers step will be faster in the flows that you already have them in.
• In order to get the speed boost for the Count by group, Sum by group, and Average by group steps, you will need to replace existing steps with their new version from the step sidebar.
• The Filter Rows step and Insert if/else column step will be about 4x faster in flows that they already exist within.

The Pull from Shopify step has been updated to pull in more information when pulling in Product Inventory. Previously, it pulled only the available inventory for each item at each location – now, it also pulls information about the items themselves! Most notable is the addition of the Cost field.

Secondly, the Send to Shopify step has been updated to work with customer addresses. When creating or updating customers, mappings are now available for the primary address fields.

The "Pull from email attachment" step has been updated to forward any verification codes back to your inbox. Once you verify a Parabola email address outside of your domain, you can automatically forwardCSV attachments to trigger your flow.