Back to Help Index

Search for Item(s)

Use Search for Item(s) to collect Podio Items from another App for later use in Actions.
NOTE: This function is best used on a Podio Calculation Field or a single line Text Field. If using a Phone field or Email field, you will first need to parse out the number. See our Examples for more help.

The Search For Item(s) action has the following required options:

  1. Choose which App to search
  2. Choose which field to match the search term on
  3. Choose the specificity of the match ("Exact" or "Contains")
  4. You can choose to ignore the triggering item in the search results

The Search operation has 2 steps before returning results to the flow:

  1. GlobiFlow passes the given search term and app to the Podio API which returns all items that have a match based on all fields
  2. GlobiFlow then iterates on each search result item to filter out items that do not match the criteria, based on the chosen field and specificity

Note: All field data, comments and files are returned for each found item. If you are receiving a truncating error or you run out of memory, it is because your App is too large and can not return all the data to GlobiFlow. You will want to better define your search criteria to collect less items.

For example, this feature can help to find duplicate entries in an App

Start flow to Trigger on Create.
No filters will be required as we want this flow to run on each new Item

Add the Search for Item(s) action. Select the Podio App and the Field to search. For the sake of this example, we chose our trigger App called "New Prospects" and the Text Field called "Company Name". We are searching for Items that contain the same "Company Name" (title) as the new Item.
Note: Be sure to check the "Ignore Self" box if searching the same App

Add a Sanity Check and create a PHP calculation to check for an exact match between the new Item and the searched Items using field tokens.

If the current item "Title" is equal to the search item "Title"
AND If the current item "Podio Item ID" is not equal to the search item "Podio Item ID"

Add the Actions required to complete this flow. Since the action to Delete the Item is permanent, we suggest creating a Task or Message to the Item Creator to make the changes to the duplicate Item.

Note: There is a 250 item limitation for Relationship fields. If you are searching for items in another App using a Relationship field, this will max out at 250.

Are you having problems with finding items in your search? Test the search in Podio to see if Podio is finding items based on your search criteria. More about using the Podio Search feature can be found here: Podio Help

Back to Help Index