What are people using for storing data for their shortcuts?

Cool Workflows
1

It seems like the two meaningful options are as a Reminder or in a File. In both cases a dictionary can be stored for use in various steps.

The File approach is somewhat nice in that it may be easier to directly edit a JSON dictionary of some basic preferences in say BBEdit on your mac and put the “preferences.txt” into the Shortucts folder of iCloud vs. into a reminder.

Anyhow, wondering what others are doing here?

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If you are looking into also manipulating the data from Shortcut itself, here are my views

  • Using Reminders is basically a friction-free way of storing data that you want to write-once, read-many. If you want to update the data in Reminders using Shortcuts, you’ll have to do a delete and replace.

  • Using JSON files are pretty much the most flexible way to do it. Unless you are working on JSON that have child nodes, or several hierarchies, they’re pretty simple to read & update.

  • .txt files are nice for single values or note-type data. I would avoid using it to store key-value pairs for the inconvenience of parsing them.

  • another option I use that’s within the Shortcuts app is the Dictionary action. I usually, use them to store only non-sensitive information (for fear of accidentally sharing the shortcut). I use this in a few ways -

    • Store metadata for the shortcut itself, shortcut name, version, changelog etc. This is mostly for informational purposes (screenshot).
    • storing constants (screenshot).
    • storing names of dependencies like other shortcuts (screenshot). If you’re like me, I have created some re-usable shortcuts that I call from other shortcuts. I do this because when you share a shortcut which calls another shortcut, you must import the dependent first. Otherwise, the Run Shortcut action won’t have a reference and you have to fix that manually.
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Thanks, that’s exactly what I was wondering and it makes sense as a division.