Scheduling & Automation

While Phiona supports one-time data imports and transformation, this action may not enable long-lasting benefit to your organization. Phiona enables significant automation capabilities that ensure your data is imported, transformed, and sent out automatically. You can automate your datasets in two ways: on a schedule, or triggered via webhook.

Please note that you can only schedule automations from connected data sources like a database, online spreadsheet, or cloud storage. We cannot automate actions from local files.

Enabling Blueprints to Be Utilized in Automations

Before you schedule a blueprint to be automated, you need to create a blueprint by manipulating a data file. To create a blueprint, you'll need to save a list of steps by clicking the Save & Continue button:

Sample Blueprint

Once you click on Save & Continue, you'll be able to select a few different options:

Slide the bar to "Yes" to save your Blueprint for the future

To be able to perform this blueprint on the file in the future, slide the Save Blueprint slider to Yes and then name your Blueprint. Then click "Confirm & Apply Blueprint".

Scheduled Automations

Click on New Scheduled Job to set up a schedule

Configuring your Scheduled Job

When you're creating a new scheduled job for your connected datasets, there are a few different options that Phiona can perform on the data depending on your preferences.

1. Name Schedule - Name your scheduled workflow so that you can easily refer back to the workflow in the future.

2. Workflow Options - These options determine the type of workflow that you want to perform.

   1. Create New Version / Refresh Existing Version: You can either create an entirely new dataset from the connected data source (that will be versioned to the time that the workflow was run) or refresh the existing dataset if you want to incorporate new data but keep the dataset the same (helpful if you have an API on top of your dataset).

   2. Export to: By default, Phiona will update the data and keep the updated dataset in Phiona. However, if you want to send your data out to another place on a regular basis (send a file by email, or update a database table), you can select this option.

   3. Run Blueprint(s): You can choose an existing blueprint to apply to the dataset after it is refreshed.

3. Export Details - If you've selected the Export to option above, the Export Details options will appear. You can send the data to any destination that Phiona currently supports.

4. Select Blueprint - If you've selected the Run Blueprint(s) option above, the Select Blueprint selector will appear. You can use any blueprint that you've created for this data source to apply.

5. Delivery Schedule - You can schedule Phiona to run the workflow once, or select a recurring amount of time (hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly) for the workflow to occur.

Please note that you can schedule daily workflows in the Starter plan, and hourly workflows in the Growth plan.

Once you click save, you'll see your scheduled workflow on the main screen:

Scheduled Jobs Screen

Webhook Automations

Select Set up New Webhook

Similar to creating a scheduled job, select "Set up New Webhook" to create a webhook-triggered refresh for your data. The screen will look like this image below:

Configuring your Webhook Job

All of the options for webhook-invoked dataset refreshes are the same as for the scheduled jobs.

The one different you'll see is the "Your Webhook URL" section. If you are using an automation tool like Zapier or Integromat, you can use this link as a custom action. As an example, if you add a new row of customer data to a Google Sheet, you can use that as a trigger for Phiona to run a blueprint that automatically cleans that data.

Request

curl -X POST https://api.future.phiona.com/api/webhooks/{webhook_id}

Response

{"msg": "success", "data": true, "status_code": 200}