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Welcome to the third unit of the “Setting up my first scenario” course within the Make Foundation.
In this unit you will gain an understanding of what is an app / module.
While following this unit, ensure that you have your Make Foundation Use Case open.
If you have not created this yet, you should access the previous units and build out the scenario.
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To keep it as simple as possible at this stage, a module is any element that you add within your scenario.
Let’s find out how to add another module. On your Make Foundation Use Case, hover over the Weather app - you see you will have the option to add another module.
Alternatively, you can double click anywhere in your scenario editor to add another module.
Next let’s explore the different types of module that exist.
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In total you can use five types of modules in Make. Each of these will perform a separate function.
Note: The last two modules listed here (Iterators and Aggregators) are considered advanced, so don’t worry about these right now.
Actions
We will use actions the most within our scenarios. Our Weather module is an example of this. It will get the data about the current weather for us.
Terminology to learn: The data we have collected from this (or any) app is referred to as a bundle.
Other examples of an action module are:
- Get the details about a post
- Add a row to a spreadsheet
- Send a push notification
- Delete a spreadsheet
- Create a report
Searches
A search module will look for data that you specify and return results. For example, you may perform a search within a database / spreadsheet to show all users over the age of 30. The search module will find this information for you, and output it in to multiple bundles.
Other examples:
- Search a range of values users age > 35
- Search by a specific location
Triggers
A trigger module will usually be the first module at the beginning of your scenario. It’s important to note that there are numerous types of triggers. The main two are known as polling and instant triggers.
All you need to know for now, is that a polling trigger will watch a service, and provide updates each time a scenario is activated. And an instant trigger will watch an account (for example Facebook or LinkedIn), and return any new information instantly.
Iterators (optional)
This is where it might start to sound complicated, but don’t worry, we will be exploring this in greater depth once we understand terminologies.
An iterator will extract a list / group of items (known as an array) an app has sent to you, and separate the information (known as bundles).
For example, you receive an email containing three attachments (an array), an iterator could be used to separate each attachment into individual items (3 separate bundles).
A real life example is like receiving a food order with a group of friends, and then handing out each person’s order to them.
Aggregators (optional)
Think of an aggregator as the opposite to an iterator; an aggregator will take multiple bundles of information, and combine them into a single bundle.
To think of this in real life terms, it is like ordering several products from a store, and then having them delivered into a single packaged order.
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There are a few questions that arise when we talk about modules and apps. Let’s go through these now.
If you want to see what type of module you are using, you will see it on the list when you select a module to add. For example, if you try to add another instance of the Weather app to your scenario, you will see that it has two action modules. This means that the Weather app can only perform these two actions: Get current weather and Get daily weather forecast.
Soon you will be adding a Google Sheets module to your scenario. There are different module types available to you in the Google Sheets app, such as Watch New Rows, Add a Row, Update a Row, and Bulk Add Rows (Advanced).
You will explore apps in the second learning path (Make Basics), but to simplify, an app is a group of modules. If you search for Slack on the list of modules, you will notice that the module types appear much different - there is no mention of action, triggers or searches. This is because the functions within the specific module are unique to that app. For example with Slack, the options mostly fall into the ‘action’ category. But are categorized for ease of use for this specific app, for example ‘messages’.
Note: Our module types differ on different apps. Here you can see MESSAGES, FILES, CHANNELS, USERS, REMINDERS etc.
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This concludes the third unit. We haven’t added anything to our scenario, but we’ve started to lay the groundwork for our use case going forward.
By now you should have an understanding of:
- What modules and apps are
- What types of actions a module can perform
- How to identify these actions
This will start to make even more sense once you start to apply it, let’s do that now by moving on to our next unit: Configuring a module.