IFTTT Building an Applet — Queries

Query Set up

Only available on the Pro+ plan, the Query step is an extra step you can place directly after a trigger. The purpose of this step is to get more detailed information from a service that might not on its own be provided just from the trigger itself. This information may then be used for the action steps or even in filter code steps to make more advanced determinations of whether actions should run. You should note this doesn’t have to query the same service but any service with Queries and so you can form the basis of multiple conditions as a trigger if combined with Filter code.

You add this step by clicking the plus symbol button after the trigger “If This” step and choose Add query. As with Triggers and Actions you will be presented with a Service to choose that contains possible queries.

Query Field

As with Action fields you may often have Query fields that will require or optionally require more specific information for the query. For example if you use Google calendar query to search events then there will be a query field to put in the actual search query itself.

Ingredients

Ingredients are effectively variables in IFTTT. These are pieces of information that pass through the automation. So instead of manually setting something such as a file name you could use an ingredient pulled from a trigger step that is a piece of information specific to when the Applet is run. For example if a new file is added to Dropbox, an ingredient may be the filename of that file. You may want to use that file name as a variable in a Query to search for the same name in another service.

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