What is a list? It is nothing more than a grouping of elements.

It can be a list of colors, foods, places, or even people, but whatever the items are, they just make one list. If there are multiple items per line, that constitutes a table. While that’s a good way to group data for this example, we’ll stick to a simple list.

Look at this list.

apartments

playground

bussiness center

fuel station

Mall

This is a very simple list. Notice how each one forms just one line. When we process lists in UBot Studio, the ability is there to load the first item and process it. And moving on, we can finally process all the items in the list.

The purpose of this article is to describe the correct way to “Save” the list to a file.

Often times, people start building their list from within a loop, which is a great way. What they don’t understand at this point is that “add to list” is a powerful node and has all the repeatability built into it. That is, if the choose by attribute is set correctly, then “add to list” should only be run once.

The only time “add to list” needs to be run multiple times is if different web pages are needed to load to get more data. This is also acceptable because this node will add the new data to the existing list.

Adding this “add to file” node will save that list to its own file. Similarly, “add to file” has the ability to save the entire list to the designated file. This means that no loops are required to write the elements individually. The entire operation is clean and efficient.

Usually this is one of the last nodes to be added after a list building process, unless of course it is not needed and is rendered.

But if you save your list, you can now review it outside of the UBot Studio environment or you can reuse it in another application.

Here is an additional tip. As you create a list, know that you are consuming memory. If you are a technology geek, you will see that memory consumption increases. So the bigger the list, the more memory will be used. If you are building a large application, you may want to consider freeing up memory that you no longer need, such as your temporary list. Just issue a “clear list” and you will see your memory footprint decrease.