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New Idea

Custom Placeholders

Related products:Freshservice
  • May 24, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 68 views

afautley
Top Contributor ⭐
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The ability to create our own placeholders would be super useful.

You have already for years had the ability to put placeholders from tickets, service items etc so this is an obvious function that is needed and used by many if not all people using workflows. 

However, many times there is hardcoded details in workflows that I have written in that need to appear in multiple places in the the workflow or in other workflows. Think if you send an email via a workflow that has a contact detail/email in it, if that email needs changing you have to go to all the workflows that it is in (and remember where it is..) or if using PowerShell app a particular application name might need to be used.

 

So if similar to credentials you have the ability to store placeholders in the admin section which are then available to use in workflows, you would be able to store an email, contact, department, name of any type to be used. if/when inevitably it changes you only need to change the placeholder and not each hardcoded workflow.  

So some technology you already have (placeholders) tweaking slightly to give flexibility to admins cutting down this admin time so they can get on with more exciting things like AI.

2 replies

DanielRuff
Top Contributor ⭐
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  • Top Contributor ⭐
  • May 29, 2024

Totally agree on this. These placeholders should also have some conditions that apply to them as well.

Thinking of environments with external integrations/apps:

We have a Jira test and prod environment. Obviously prod freshservice talks to jira prod. Once I’m in the sandbox I don’t want to change the endpoint to the jira test instance manually (~10 nodes in 15 workflows). Same with credentials. You don’t want the workflow in the sandbox to use prod credentials or endpoints so that here is no risk of sandbox sending any api call to productive systems.


liteblue
Community Debut
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  • Community Debut
  • June 5, 2026

This is a great suggestion. Custom placeholders would make workflow management much more efficient by reducing the need to update the same information across multiple automations. A centralized approach would improve consistency, save administrative time, and minimize errors when details change. As automation and AI continue to evolve, resources like Ai Techk also highlight how smarter workflow design can help teams focus on innovation rather than repetitive maintenance tasks.