Airscript Quickstart

Airscript is the programming language provided by Airkit. It is designed to be a simple, but powerful programming language with a focus on data manipulation. It's by strategically combining Airscript with input from app users (or other external sources, such as an external API) that you control the order, flow, and nature of the interactions between your Airkit apps and the outside world. Most commonly, this is done by defining a variable with Airscript or by using Airscript to access or modify data via the Transform Data Operation, both of which parse any input in Airscript by default.

For a deeper dive into how to try out some Airscript expressions, check out Testing Airscript Expressions.

Functions

Like most programming languages, Airscript makes extensive use of functions. You can find an alphabetical listing of the functions that Airscript supports on the Airscript Functions page.

Arithmetic Operators

Airscript supports the standard arithmetic operators: addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*) , and division (/), as well as remainder (%).

All arithmetic operators are capable of operating on Numbers and likewise returning Numbers as output. Some arithmetic operators are also capable of operating on variables of other Data Types, such as Currency. See Arithmetic Operators reference documentation for details.

Comparison Operators

Equality

Airscript has a number of comparison operators. The equality operator (=), returns TRUE when two values are the same, and FALSE when they are not the same value. For example consider the following expressions:

2 = 2 => TRUE  
2 = 1 => FALSE  
"Airscript" = "Airscript" => TRUE  
"Airscript" = "airscript" => FALSE

Comparing two values of different type will always be FALSE, for example:

2 = "Airscript" => FALSE

It is important to be careful when comparing two complex values such as Objects, Lists, Dates, Times, Datetimes, and NULL. The result will only be TRUE if the two values are exactly the same rather than just similar. For example

Inequality

In addition to the equality operator Airscript also supports an inequality operator which is the opposite of the equality operator. The inequality operator can be accessed by the symbol <> as well as the symbol !=. To understand the inequality operator consider the opposite of our previous examples.

2 <> 2 => FALSE  
2 != 2 => FALSE  
2 <> 1 => TRUE  
2 != 1 => TRUE  
"Airscript" <> "Airscript" => FALSE  
"Airscript" != "Airscript" => FALSE  
"Airscript" <> "airscript" => TRUE  
"Airscript" != "airscript" => TRUE  
2 <> "Airscript" => TRUE  
2 != "Airscript" => TRUE

Ordering

Airscript supports the following ordering operators: greater than (>), greater than or equal (>=), less than (<), less than or equal (<=). The ordering operators can be used with Numbers and Strings. For numbers these operators compare the magnitude of the number. Consider the following examples:

1 < 2 => TRUE  
1 <= 2 => TRUE  
1 < 1 => FALSE  
1 <= 1 => TRUE  
1 > 2 => FALSE  
1 >= 2 => FALSE  
1 > 1 => FALSE  
1 >= 1 => TRUE

The ordering operators compare Strings lexicographically, consider the following examples:

"air" < "airscript" => TRUE  
"air" <= "airscript" => TRUE  
"airscript" < "airscript" => FALSE  
"airscript" <= "airscript" => TRUE  
"air" > "airscript" => FALSE  
"air" >= "airscript" => FALSE  
"airscript" > "airscript" => FALSE  
"airscript" >= "airscript" => TRUE

Comparing the order between two complex objects will always return FALSE.

Accessing Data within Collections

Object Property Access

Objects are a data type that relates field names to values. For example, an address in the United States is typically made up of a Street, City, State, and Zipcode. In Airkit, an example of an Object holding such data might look like this:

{  
  street: "200 California Ave.",  
  city: "Palo Alto",  
  state: "CA",  
  zip: "94036"  
}

In order to access the street property, one would use dot notation:

({  
  street: "200 California Ave.",  
  city: "Palo Alto",  
  state: "CA",  
  zip: "94036"  
}).street

or, if the Object were stored in a variable named address:

address.street

List Access

Lists are a data type that store data in a particular order. Imagine we have a list of book titles, in Airscript it might look like this:

[  
  "The Little Schemer",  
  "The Seasoned Schemer",  
  "The Reasoned Schemer",  
  "The Little Prover",  
  "The Little Typer"  
]

A particular item can be accessed from a list by its numerical index in the list. Indices begin at the number zero, in other words, the first item in the list is accessed at index 0. In order to retrieve the book title "The Little Schemer" from our example you would do so like this:

[  
  "The Little Schemer",  
  "The Seasoned Schemer",  
  "The Reasoned Schemer",  
  "The Little Prover",  
  "The Little Typer"  
][0]

or, if the list were stored in a variable named books:

books[0]

Creating Custom Airscript Functions

Custom Airscript functions, defined in terms of established Airscript operators, can be defined in the Connections Builder. For a deeper diving into User Defined Functions, check out this article.