Transformations

Modify your data before it's sent to destinations

Types of Transformations

Freshpaint supports three uses for transformations

Standard Mapping

Standard mappings are used to re-format the data you send to Freshpaint into the structure that a destination accepts and assigns special meaning to. For example, you can use transformations to rename your add_to_cart event that you're sending to Freshpaint into Facebook or Pinterest's AddToCart event.

Standard Events

Modify Data

You can use transformations to modify the data Freshpaint sends to destinations in order to match historical data or remove sensitive information before they are sent to a destination.

Modify Data

Modify User Data

Identify transformations allow you to re-format OR modify the user data you send to Freshpaint. This can be particularly useful if a certain destination requires a user property in one format, and another destination requires that same user property in a different format.

For example, if one destination enforces a naming convention that the user's operating system must be sent as user_os while another destination requires the operating system to be sent as os, you can rename the user property accordingly before the identify event is sent to the destination.

Modify User Data

SQL transformations do not apply to identify events at this time.

Supported Operations

Rename Event

Use this operation to rename the event. For example, if you have an event named order_complete, but you want this to be named OrderCompleted in a destination, you can use this operation.

You can only rename an event once. If you try to add two "Rename Event" operations to a given event + destination combination, you will receive an error.

Rename Property

Use this operation to rename a property. This is often used to fix typos without involving developers, or for fixing data to match historical data.

Example use cases:

Rename a property with a typo like referer to referrer

Rename the property cart_total to revenue

Change Property Type

Use this operation to convert between text, number, and true/false values of a property.

If a value cannot be converted to the desired type, it is left untouched.

Convert To Number

When converting a property into a number, we leave everything that is not text untouched. For text, we attempt to parse it as a decimal value, if it has characters that are non-numeric, it fails.

Initial Value	Initial Type	Result Value	Result Type
"-1"	Text	-1	Number
"24.6"	Text	24.6	Number
"$812.37"	Text	"$812.37"	Text
1	Number	1	Number
null	Null	null	Null
"button"	Text	"button"	Text
"$fourty-five"	Text	"$fourty-five"	Text

Convert To Text

When converting a property's value to text, we leave null and text values as-is, but convert objects, arrays, numbers and true/false values. For objects and arrays, we json-encode them without modifying the sub-element's types. For numbers and true/false values, we simply convert them to text as you'd expect.

Initial Value	Initial Type	Result Value	Result Type
true	True/False	"true"	Text
1	Number	"1"	Text
null	Null	null	Null
"button"	Text	"button"	Text
{x: 'yes', y: 23}	Object	'{"x": "yes", "y": 23}'	Text (json-encoded)
[1, 2, 3, "no", false]	Array	"[1, 2, 3, 'no', false]"	Text (json-encode)

Convert To True/False

When converting a property's value to True/False, all values besides the text values t, f, true and false (case insensitive) are let as-is.

Note: the numerical values of 0 and 1 are not converted to false or true

Initial Value	Initial Type	Result Value	Result Type
't'	Text	true	True/False
'f'	Text	false	True/False
'x'	Text	'x'	Text
'TrUe'	Text	true	True/False
'fAlse'	Text	false	True/False
'truthful'	Text	'truthful'	Text
true	True/False	true	True/False
false	True/False	false	True/False
0	Number	0	Number
42	Number	42	Number

Uppercase/Lowercase Property

Use these operations to convert the value of a property to upper or lower case. Useful for normalizing email addresses, or converting a currency property from usd to USD to match historical data.

Delete Property

Use this operation to delete an event property. This is often useful if you want to remove sensitive data from flowing into a third party destination.

Send Built-in Property

Use this operation to send the built-in properties to destinations that Freshpaint automatically captures for each event.

The following built-in properties are currently supported:

Builtin Property Name	Remarks	Example Value
Time	Unix timestamp when the event was captured	1660750813.235
Device ID
User ID	Identifier for the user. Can be a UUID if the user is anonymous, or the user email if logged in.	[e-mail]
OS	Operating System	Mac OS X
Browser		Chrome
Browser Version		104
Current URL	Full url of the page on which the event was captured.	https://yourwebsite.com/pages/target-page.html?param=value
Host	Domain of the page on which the event was captured.	yourwebsite.com
Initial Referrer
Initial Referring Domain
IP	The user's IP Address
Pathname		/pages/target-page.html
Referrer
Referring Domain
Screen Height	Screen height in pixels	1080
Screen Width	Screen width in pixels	1920
UTM Source
UTM Medium
UTM Campaign
UTM Content
UTM Term
Pageview ID
Session ID
Target Text	Text of the element which was clicked on	button text
Href	The href of a link which was clicked on	yourhref.com

You can also see the built-in properties that captures in liveview.

View Built-in properties for each event in Live View

Send Constant Property

Use this operation to send some constant value as a property. You can use one of the following values:

• Number, which support numeric values (42, 42.1, 0.123)

• True/False, which supports only True or False as literal booleans

• Text, which can be any text

Transformations Dashboard

From the transformation dashboard, you can view and edit your existing transformations, as well as launch the wizard to guide you through creating a new transformation.

Transformations are grouped into sets based on their Transformation Type, Freshpaint Event and Destination.

Creating a new transformation

You can launch the wizard to create a new transformation by clicking the button in the top right.

Add a new operation to a transformation

1. Expand the transformation set you want to modify by clicking on it. If you just created a new transformation via the wizard, it will already be opened.

Expanding a transformation set

2. Click the + button and choose the operation you want to apply. See above for operation descriptions.

Deleting or modifying an operation

1. Expand the transformation set that contains the operation you want to modify by clicking on it. If you just created a new transformation via the wizard, it will already be opened.

2. Click on the operation you want to delete or modify. It will highlight and show a pencil icon as you hover over it.

3. From here you can either change the attributes and click "Save" or delete the operation by clicking "delete."

Deleting an entire transformation set

You can delete an entire set of transformations by clicking on the trash icon on the right side of any transformation set.