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Prem SundaramDo you use Google Sheets to import and export metadata from Fabric Studio, Hollywood’s #1 Title Management solution? If so, you will love our Flomenco WorkFlo no-code Google Sheets ↔️ Fabric Studio workflow to exchange data between these two systems seamlessly.
Many of our customers, like you, have told us that spreadsheets are a convenient and familiar method of managing and editing metadata before ingesting it into tools like Fabric Studio. As a result, we created the Flomenco Google Sheets ↔️ Fabric Studio workflow.
Using Flomenco WorkFlo you can easily read data from Fabric Studio into Google Sheets, edit the data in Google Sheets, and then write it back to Fabric Studio from Google Sheets.
You can also use Flomenco WorkFlo’s out-of-the-box helper nodes to introduce business logic to this workflow, filter and validate the data from Fabric Studio to Google Sheets or from Google Sheets to Fabric Studio, and send error notifications.
In this blog post, we will introduce you to the Flomenco WorkFlo Google Sheets ↔️ Fabric Studio workflow and how you can use it to streamline your metadata migration to Fabric Studio.
How to create a Flomenco WorkFlo Google Sheets ↔️ Fabric Studio workflow
In summary, this works by configuring the credentials for your Google Sheet and Fabric Studio accounts and then creating a workflow between a Google Sheet and your Fabric Studio instance - the whole process is as easy as 1,2,3. It can be configured in just a few minutes. Here’s the step-by-step detail of how you do it if you want to try it yourself:
Scenario:
Let’s assume you have a Google Sheet you are working on that is a staging area for new media content. In it, you have the title of a record and some additional data, such as year and synopsis. The goal is that when a user changes the Status to ‘Approved,’ the new entry will automatically flow into Fabric Studio. Then, after the record is created in Fabric Studio, we will update the Google Sheet and set the status to 'Published.’
The final workflow will look like this. In the rest of this article, we’ll walk you through each step of the process.
Configure Credentials for Google Sheets and Fabric Studio
This is done in the Credentials section of Flomenco WorkFlo. Once you have configured these, you can use them again in future workflows you create.
For Google Sheets you will need to get your OAuth Redirect URL and Client ID and Secret which are available from your Google account admin.
For Fabric Studio, you will need to ask your Fabric Studio administrator for the API Endpoint, API Key, and Token:
Configure Workflow Steps
Monitor a Google Sheet for the status ‘Approved’ condition
To configure the workflow, we will start by adding the trigger to check for changes to Google Sheets. In Flomenco, click the + icon at the top right to add a new node. Search for Google Sheets and select the ‘On Row Updated’ trigger.
When you click on this, it brings up this configuration window where you will select the Google Sheet, the tab within the sheet and the column to watch ‘Status’. Once configured, you click ‘Fetch Test Data,’ and you see the data in the Google Sheet.
So, now we have connectivity to the Google Sheet and will now add an IF statement to add the logic to our workflow. Our goal is to only process rows when the Status is changed to Approved. Like before, go back to the canvas and add the IF node.
When you add the IF node to the canvas, it will open up by default like this:
Now just click in the top-left corner ‘Back to Canvas’ and connect it to the Google Trigger, connecting the output of the Trigger to the input of the IF node:
Now, let’s configure the IF condition. This is where Flomenco's no-code capabilities come in. Click on ‘Add Condition’, and all you need to do is drag the item on the left side for which you want to monitor (the input from Google Sheets) into the condition field on the right side. Here, we drag Status into the field, and Flomenco configures the query. Then, we edit the Result to make sure it is what we want to monitor for. In this example, the test record was already set to Status Approved, so we don’t need to make any changes there.
To check that the node is working, click ‘Execute Node’ and you’ll see the result on the right-hand side:
The node is working correctly and is passing on the Google row when Status is ‘Approved’.
Write Record to Fabric Studio
Now, we will follow a similar process, this time adding the Fabric Studio node and mapping the fields that we want. For this simple example, we will create a record in Fabric Studio when the status is Approved. Alternative variations of this workflow might check if the record already exists in Fabric Studio to update it instead.
Like before, search for the Fabric Studio node and select the ‘Create a record' action. Then, wire up the node first to the previous IF statement’s true output.
Then open the node, and you will be able to pass test data from the previous steps and make your node configuration very easy. Like before, we drag the fields we want to use to create the item in Fabric Studio. Here, we drag the Title field from the left into the Title field on the Fabric Studio node fields configuration. We also configure the synopsis and year, as shown below.
Now, let’s execute the node and test!
And Voila, we see Flomenco has automatically created the record in Fabric Studio with the fields we wanted.
Update Google Sheet
To complete our workflow once the item is published in Fabric Studio, we want to update the Google Sheet and change the value of that record from ‘Approved’ to ‘Published’.
Add a ‘Google Sheet Create or Append Row node’ and select the 'Append or update row in sheet' node action.
As before, first wire it up. Then, open the node to configure the update action.
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You can see here we select Google Sheets, and then we tell Flomenco how to know which record to update in the Google Sheets. We want Flomenco to update the Google Sheet record that matches the Title. This is quickly done by configuring ‘Column to Match On’ - the value is the ‘original_title’ field we just populated in Fabric Studio. Again, all we do is drag that item into the Title field in the Google Sheet configuration. Now Flomenco knows what row in the Google Sheet to update. Finally, we type ‘Published’ into the Status field. This will be the value Flomenco updates the sheet with, changing it from Approved to Published.
Let’s test the node and check:
Ta-da! The Google Sheet has been updated! Now, just make sure to set the workflow to Active, and Flomenco will keep working in the background as you switch between Google Sheets and Fabric Studio.
As the users change the status from Draft to Approved, Flomenco completes the work, as you can see in this final output from Google Sheets:
Benefits of the Flomenco WorkFlo Google Sheets ↔️ Fabric Studio Workflow
You’ve just seen how easy it is to create a workflow that improves productivity between systems like Google Sheets and Fabric Studio. This solution maintains Fabric Studio as your source of truth for metadata but makes it easy to edit bulk data in a simple interface like Google Sheets.
Now that you have done this, you can imagine extending the workflows to perform the following additional actions:
- Read metadata from Fabric Studio into Google Sheets: This could copy data from Fabric Studio into the Google Sheets first. You can overwrite or append the new data to the sheet.
- Update data into Fabric Studio from Google Sheets: This would create and update existing records in Fabric Studio with the changes made in the Google Sheets.
Summary
Flomenco WorkFlo is a powerful tool that simplifies and automates the data exchange between Google Sheets and Fabric Studio. With Flomenco WorkFlo, you can save time, reduce errors, and improve data quality when migrating and updating your title metadata from any source into Fabric Studio. Flomenco WorkFlo’s no-code drag-and-drop interface lets you quickly iterate and is easily adapted to meet your needs.