I’m curious what are some of the common use cases for the return data from API action that is only available in the backend workflows.
Also interested in any tutorials or articles on the topic as the Bubble manual is a bit thin on the topic, so I do not even have much of an idea of what the return data from api action is supposed to do in the sense of whether those values returned are somehow made available to a page.
In most case, I’m using this when I need complex WF (not just creating or updating one item, this could be done with Data API) or when I need to return more data than just one thing with a different payload structure than the one provided by Bubble by default. Also, webhook validation sometimes need to return data
This is actually an under utilised use case of bubble.io as a backend. It has multiple use cases like exposing bubble backend to external applications.
You can also make complex workflows in bubble backend and return their result through this.
I once had to make some API calls in some other no code platform and it wasnt allowing to make those in their front end so I ended up using bubble backend to make those api calls and return their result through these backend workflows.
You may want show something in the backend and return the result in front end you can use it for that .
So its quite versatile that way and can be used for multiple use cases.
I recently created a custom GPT trained for bubble and it returned this .
https://chat.openai.com/share/8c4f2f8d-6e08-45aa-8977-4934ae74c03d
Calling backend workflows from front-end and using data in the backend workflow in the front-end after it’s complete
My biggest use is providing Facebook catalog a URL that returns XML to fb catalog for every ecom store.
Once they upgraded to allow different content type returns it took what used to be an annoying long process to setup that required multiple 3rd party services to stay stable into a now under 5 min setup.
Additionally, return data can be used to create custom return formatting when your API is hit to run workflows, at the end of the flow you return data and can custom format using “results from step x” or used for API calls to pull data specifically that needs a special format.
Authentication is another use case, you can run a bunch of checks overriding privacy rules and return a yes/no to the client. ( I don’t mean user authentication, it could be verifying a code, checking if something exists etc.)
Also plenty of use cases for when processing information that shouldn’t be visible to the client, then returning the result (could be text, y/n or an entire bubble object)
@Jici @ketanmk26 @georgecollier @chris.williamson1996 @DjackLowCode Thank you for all the insights and varied use cases. I’m going to have to start playing around with this feature to wrap my head around it to understand more of it’s capabilities, but these shared ideas are all great in helping me get started.
Would love to hear more from others who may have applied the feature to different use cases.
Just Implemented SSO using it.
