Zapier formatter issue: Can't pull in own data to test private note comment split

Hi @meganvrw 

Good question.

After creating a new Note in Freshdesk, have you tried pulling thru new examples in the Zap trigger?

Hey, thanks for your response! Yeah I’ve tried multiple times, I’ve added new notes as tests and pulled again and still nothing

Hi @shalgrim, thanks so much for getting back to me on that and for making the feature request! It makes sense now why it wasn’t working.

Yes, if you could help me split the comment field that would be amazing. The comment will be structured like this in freshdesk:

SP Closed

SP ID: 123456

Booking ID: 123456

Customer comment: “some comment”

I would like to send each row into it’s own gsheets column.

Thanks!

Right, I think we can do this pretty much entirely with Formatter

First, in the step after Freshdesk, choose Formatter and the Text action

Then when you click on Continue, set up your action like so:

This should output each line as a separate field that, if you’re using something like the Google Sheets Create Row action, will let you map each to one of that sheet’s columns.

Like I say with that Separator field, it’s hard to know just how Freshdesk is formatting the text without playing with it (since it’s whitespace), but you can start with [:newline:] and go from there. If you click on the “more” link there, you’ll find a link to this help desk on other ways to split by special characters. 

If everything fails there we can try with a Code step

Let me know how that goes!

Hey @shalgrim thanks for that! This step is fine, but the problem is then dealing with the following action. I want to put each separated field into it’s own column, but if I only get one output from the formatter I can’t do this.

@meganvrw 

I’m confused as to why you’re only getting one output. What do you have as your Segment Index selection in the Formatter step?

@shalgrim I think it’s because there’s only one word in the comment field of the test data so it can only give one output, this is what I’m doing in the previous step:
 

Okay, @meganvrw , I understand.

This may take some fiddling to get just right, but you can map fields that aren’t even in your test data by “faking a pill.”

The think you’ll want to enter into the column fields is of this format:

{{123456789__output__Item 3}}

The breakdown of that is as follows:

123456789 is the Node ID of the formatter step. You can get it by selecting the Formatter step in the editor then copying the last big number in the URL that shows. E.g., https://zapier.com/editor/999999999/published/123456789

Then, notice that when we have underscores there they are actually double underscores: __ not _

And then the “Item N” refers to each line in your formatted note. I think, based on what you shared above, that the first line is going to be “Item 1,” the second line will be “Item 3,” and so on, since the blank lines will be the even numbers.

Do you want to give that a try and let me know how it goes?