Understand explode mode

How explode works 

When you configure an explode action, you specify:

• Path: The field containing the array you want to explode.

• To: The name of the field that will hold each individual element in the new events.

• Limit (optional): The maximum number of events to emit (defaults to 500).

For example, if we have the following array of users in an action called "Get employees":

{
  "employees": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "Ava Nguyen",
      "email": "ava.nguyen@example.com",
      "role": "admin"
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "name": "Liam Hart",
      "email": "liam.hart@example.com",
      "role": "editor"
    },
    {
      "id": 3,
      "name": "May Smith",
      "email": "may.smith@example.com",
      "role": "engineer"
    }
  ]
}

We set the "Explode employee list" action's explode Path to point to the upstream action's array, get_employees.body.employees, and set the explode's To value to individual_employee. Each element (aka each employee in this example) within the array will have its own event that comes out of the explode:

{
  "guid": "045a0cd6-ef96-4382-996f-54c455f4bd2e",
  "index": 2,
  "size": 3,
  "individual_employee": {
    "id": 3,
    "name": "May Smith",
    "email": "may.smith@example.com",
    "role": "engineer"
  }
}

For each element in the array, Tines creates a new event that includes:

• The individual array element in the field you specified (identified by the To value set in the explode. In our example, this would be individual_employee).

• An index key showing the element's position in the original array (starting at 0).

• A guid key that uniquely identifies this explode operation.

• A size key indicating the total number of elements in the original array.

When to use explode 

Exploding is ideal when you need to:

• Process each item in an array individually.

• Perform different actions on each element.

• Make API calls for each item in a list.

• Apply conditional logic to individual items.

• Enrich each element with additional data.

🖐️ Try this: Configure and run an explode