In this concise tutorial, Dennis H. Lewis walks Bubble developers through a method for handling temporary data without creating permanent database tables. He first demonstrates how to use Bubble's API Connector to set up a dummy GET call that contains a raw JSON schema (e.g., an Account Pair with fields like account, amount, level, type). Initializing this call creates a reusable data structure. He then shows how to store instances of that structure in a custom state—optionally as a list—so they can be added, iterated, and passed to workflows on the front‑end or back‑end. For more complex scenarios, he introduces the JSON Assistant plugin, which provides actions and page elements that automatically parse real API responses into the predefined JSON structure, handling the mapping for the developer. The video concludes with a brief call‑to‑action to contact ragefield.dev for help and to like/subscribe.
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In this quick little video, I just want to address kind of one of those annoying problems that you've probably come across in Bubble at some point in your journey, and you pull out your hair because you don't really know how to fix it. And you can see that's already happened to me. So let's just jump in there and talk about how you can create temporary data structures that you can use in your workflows without having to have an actual database table. Okay, because sometimes you just need a structure that you can manage for a while and then continue your life, and you don't want to be, you know, storing things into the database and pulling them back out and all of that complicated stuff. So the way we're going to do this is by using JSON structures. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to go into the API connector and you're going to create a dummy API call. It's not going to call anything. Here I've created it in a collection called JSON. And I'm going to show you one here. I've got one called Account Pair, and you can see it's just a GET. There's no URL. There's no credentials up here, no headers, nothing at all. You're just going to go in and in the raw section, you're going to paste in a JSON structure. And so here I've done account, amount, level, type, you know, and they're all strings, but you could have numbers or— and then just initialize the The API call, and now you have a structure. One of the easiest ways to use this is if you just go to any element on your— in your Bubble application and you click up here and you create a custom state. So I'm going to hit new and I'm going to say account pair, and boom, I can create a new account pair. And I can make it a list if I want, and I can add things into it from my workflows. And then I can run a workflow on a list and pass it this list of account pairs. And it'll work just fine. So that is one of the simplest ways to do that. But sometimes you want to get a little bit more sophisticated. And in that case, you're going to go and you're going to get a plugin called JSON Assistant. And this plugin gives you all sorts of actions that you can use. It also gives you elements that you can put on your page so that you can take, for example, information that you've received from an API call and parse it automatically and say, give it to me. Using this structure as the data type. And so it'll go out and it'll read that, pull in the API call, and it'll do all the mapping for you. And then voilà, you've got a list of these structures that you can use and you can pass into a workflow on a list, or you can go through them one by one, or you can do whatever you need to from a backend workflow, from a frontend workflow, from, you know, something that's on your page. You can pull that in and just use it directly. It's super, super powerful. There is a solution to when you just need a, you know, a temporary variable with a structure. This is how you can do it. It's super simple. If you need any help, feel free to reach out to us here at ragefield.dev. And if you've enjoyed this video, give it a like, thumbs up, and we would really appreciate it if you subscribe to our channel. Thanks a lot. See you on the next video.
