Ensuring Xano correctly identifies the data type (string, integer, array) of inputs and variables is important to making things work as expected.
There is already a very long community thread about how to take a string input containing integers in an array and have Xano treat them as an array, rather than a string.
This is just one side of the problem, however, because it doesn’t address how to handle this issue when calling an external API; it only addresses when Xano is the API being called.
An example where this is important is when making calls to the OpenAI GPT-3.5/4 API. In my use case, I use a system message instructing the model to return the results as an array. It does this, but from Xano’s perspective, the response is a string:
This is problematic if you have subsequent logic that needs to use this as an actual array.
Fortunately, I found a very simple, but lame, workaround: just create a Lambda function that returns the variable in question:
So all you need to do is write a JavaScript snippet that returns whichever input or variable is the original array (in string form), like this:
return $input.array_string
That’s it.