Saving data from Reusable Element with workflow triggered outside of the reusable element

[fayewatson]

My pleasure, @artemzheg! I’ve found custom states to be very useful too, and they’re definitely needed for that type of setup with reusable elements. One downside to custom states is that you can’t set their default values to be dynamic. If you need to set a custom states usinng a dynamic expression, you need to have multiple “When page is loaded” workflows which change the custom states values.

A few months back, I stopped using custom states almost completely on the page and instead use ‘hidden variable groups’ within a popup on each page, in order to store and use temporary values in workflows. All credit goes to AirDev for this approach; it has saved a ton of time!

@seanhoots describes more on this here:

[New Feature] Default value for Custom States

While waiting for this feature, you could use a hidden popup to store all your variables instead of custom states (credit to AirDev and @vlad for this pro tip). So instead of creating a custom state, you create a popup and add groups or repeating groups, for single values and lists respectively. These are actually more useful than custom states because they can have default data sources, conditional data sources, or have their data set by a workflow. Since I learnt this approach I never use c…

And here’s the link to AirDev’s documentation on this:
https://docs.airdev.co/canvas/general-information/functionality/hidden-variables-popup