What are Data Types?

Data types are pre-defined data structures that have many different uses. Among them:

• Providing complete objects as inputs for robots
• Providing a structure in which to build data sets
• Providing standardized outputs for robots
• Manipulating data in pipes robots

Data types and property types

Data types act as object templates. For example, if you create a Person data type, then each Person you create will share the same properties of the same types:

Properties in a data type can be of the following:

• Text
• Number
• True/False
• Multiple choice
• Object

Any property can also be defined as a list. Setting a property as a list tells us that the property accepts more than one value, that is to say, it is a list of values of the type given.

We defined ID as being a key. This means that the ID property is unique, so when there are multiple Person objects in a data set, each person will have a unique ID.

In this example, a Person data type contains an id, firstName and lastName text values. Each Person will also have an age property which has to be a number; attempting to assign it a value that is not a number will result in the value not being assigned. Each Person also has a europeanCitizen property which can either be true or false.

Multiple choice values act as text values, but are restricted to the choices given when creating the data type; in this example, gender can only be the text male or female.

Objects are groups of properties that can be nested indefinitely. In this example, a Person can have multiple socialMedia objects, with each socialMedia object consisting of a service and an accountOrId property. Objects can also contain objects inside of them.