Tips & Best Practices

What You'll Learn

This is a quick-reference guide for anyone building and maintaining recipes in PlanRadar Connect. It consolidates the most important principles from across the documentation into a single scannable page — pin it, bookmark it, or paste it on your wall.

⚠️ Critical Rules (Read These First)

⚠️ PRC does not auto-save. Save your recipe frequently and deliberately. Navigating away without saving loses all unsaved changes, permanently.

⚠️ Exhausted tasks stop all recipes. When your monthly task allocation runs out, every active recipe stops and will not restart automatically. Manual restart is required. Test high-frequency and looping recipes carefully before activating.

⚠️ Infinite trigger loops will burn your entire task budget. Any recipe triggered by an object update that also updates the same object must include infinite loop protection. Use the origin_user_agent does not contain workato trigger condition. Without this, a single accidental loop can exhaust 1,000 tasks in minutes.

⚠️ Exceeding the API rate limit blocks your token for 5 minutes. PlanRadar allows 30 API requests per minute. Loops that make per-item API calls must include a 2–5 second wait step between iterations (use the Workato Scheduler tool). A blocked token causes all recipes using it to fail.

⚠️ Repeat While loops are infinite by default. Always define and test a clear exit condition before activating any recipe containing a Repeat While loop.

Building Recipes

• Start simple. Build and test one step at a time before adding complexity. A recipe that works with one step is easier to debug than one with fifteen.

• Use Test mode, not Live mode, during development. Test mode fires the trigger once only — this protects you from accidentally processing bulk data during development.

• Repeat past jobs instead of re-triggering events. From the Jobs view, replay a previous job to re-test without having to recreate the original event in PlanRadar.

• Copy steps between recipes. If a step works in one recipe, copy it rather than rebuilding it. Rebuilding introduces errors and wastes time.

• Clone recipes as templates. For similar workflows, duplicate an existing recipe and modify it rather than starting from scratch.

Working with Data

• Always check for field presence before evaluating custom field values. Empty custom fields are absent from API responses entirely — reading them without checking first causes recipe errors.

• Use field IDs, not display names, for custom fields. Display names can be changed by any admin. Field IDs are stable.

• Refresh response schemas when PlanRadar object structures change. If a recipe stops passing data correctly after custom fields are added or changed, paste a fresh API response into the HTTP step's response schema to update the data tree.

• Use JSON formatter tools when writing request bodies. Paste your JSON payload into an online validator before running the recipe. Malformed JSON is a common and frustrating source of failures.

Loops & Performance

• Add a 2–5 second wait between loop iterations. Use the Workato Scheduler tool. This keeps you well within the 30 requests/minute API rate limit.

• Use batch operations where possible. Avoid individual API calls per object if a bulk endpoint is available. Bulk calls consume fewer tasks and are faster.

• Use page_size=500 for medium-sized datasets. Avoids the complexity of pagination logic for datasets under 500 objects.

• Exit conditions for Repeat While loops are not optional. A missing or incorrect exit condition creates an infinite loop. Define it, test it, then activate.

Documentation & Maintenance

• Document every recipe. Use the recipe description field for overall purpose and step comments for individual logic. Recipes without documentation become unmaintainable.

• Document complex conditions and formulas. Explain why a condition exists, not just what it does.

• Use Project Properties and Environment Variables for shared values. Hardcoded values that appear in multiple recipes become a maintenance burden. Centralise them.

• Audit your connections periodically. Remove unused connections. Ensure active connections use service accounts rather than individual user credentials.

Troubleshooting

• The Jobs view is your primary debugging tool. Click any step in a past job to see exactly what data was received and returned. This is almost always sufficient to identify where something went wrong.

• Job data is only retained for 30 days. If you need to retain audit or diagnostic data, export it before the retention window closes.

• If an API endpoint isn't documented, find it in the browser. Open the PlanRadar UI, open developer tools (F12), go to the Network tab, perform the action, and inspect the resulting API call. This works for features like the Approvals module that may not yet be in the official docs.

• Use the Logger tool during development. Output variable values to the job log at key points in your recipe to confirm data is what you expect.

Quick Reference: When to Use What

For technical questions, contact the PlanRadar integrations team at integrations@planradar.com