Utility Actions

Utility Actions

Utility actions are the workflow's power tools: run an AI Prompt, call a Pipe (a saved API call), execute your own JavaScript, or display a status message to the user.

At-a-glance summary

Action	Use when…
AI Prompt	You want to use AI to summarize, classify, generate, or transform text/data.
Trigger Pipe	You have a saved Pipe (API request template) and want to call it.
Run Custom Code	You need custom logic that doesn't fit into another action — math, data transformation, calling an external API, branching logic too complex for a Condition step.
Show Message	You want to surface progress messages to the end user during a workflow run.

AI Prompt

Runs an AI Prompt (built in your app's AI Prompts section) with values supplied from the workflow, and exposes the response to later steps.

Configuration

• AI Prompt — pick the prompt to run.
• Inputs — fill in the variables the prompt declares. Each input can come from the source record, a previous step, the logged-in user, or a custom value.

Step output:

• response — the raw AI response.
• fields — structured fields if the prompt is configured to return structured output (e.g. summary, sentiment, category).

Example: When a Support Ticket is submitted, run the "Triage Ticket" AI Prompt with the ticket body. The prompt returns a category (Billing/Bug/Feature) and a priority (Low/Med/High). The next step updates the ticket with those values and routes it to the right team.

For everything you can do with AI Prompts, see the Tadabase AI documentation.

Trigger Pipe

Calls a Pipe and exposes the response to later steps. Pipes are pre-configured API call templates — base URL, headers, auth, parameters, and field mappings — so you set one up once and reuse it from many workflows.

Configuration

• Pipe — pick which Pipe to call.
• Method — pick which Pipe method (e.g. "Get Customer," "Create Invoice").
• Parameters — fill in any parameters the method declares, mapping each to a workflow value.

Step output:

• response — the parsed response body from the API.
• fields — extracted fields if the Pipe is configured with response field mappings.
• status_code — the HTTP status code.
• full_response — the complete response, including headers and any errors.

Example: When an Invoice is marked "Send to QuickBooks," call the "QuickBooks Invoice" Pipe with the invoice fields. The Pipe returns the QuickBooks invoice ID, which the next step writes back to the Tadabase record.

For Pipe setup, see the Pipes documentation.

Run Custom Code

Executes JavaScript you write, in a secure sandbox, with access to the source record, your declared inputs, the logged-in user, and your app variables. Use it for anything that doesn't fit into another action — math, formatting, data shaping, calling an external API.

This is a deep topic with its own dedicated article — see Running Custom JavaScript in a Workflow for the full reference, including:

• Globals and helpers available inside the sandbox (fetch, DateTime, Str, Num, Arr, Obj, crypto.randomUUID).
• How to declare inputs, read from record, and return values to later steps.
• Limits (30-second wall clock, 128 MB memory, allowlisted outbound HTTP).
• Tested example snippets (calculate totals, call APIs, generate IDs, branch on data).

Quick example — calculating order totals:

// price and qty come from the source record
const price = Number(record.price || 0);
const qty   = Number(record.qty   || 0);
const tax   = 0.0875;

const subtotal = price * qty;
const total    = Num.round(subtotal * (1 + tax), 2);

returnData("subtotal", subtotal);
returnData("total",    total);

The next step in the workflow can reference subtotal and total as Action Response values to update the order record.

Show Message

Displays a status message to the end user. Most useful in client-side workflows (workflows triggered from the user's browser by a Trigger Workflow action button) — the user sees toast or modal messages while the workflow runs.

Each Show Message step can define four messages:

• Start — shown when the step begins.
• Processing — shown while the step runs.
• Completed Success — shown when the step finishes cleanly.
• Completed Error — shown if the step errors.

You can also enable per-step notifications on most other action types — Show Message is the dedicated step for when displaying a message is the goal, not just a side effect.

Example: A multi-step workflow that creates an invoice, generates a PDF, and emails the customer. Add Show Message at the start ("Generating your invoice…") and at the end ("Done! Check your email.") so the user knows what's happening.