What data VLOOKUP receives from HubSpot

The one business value a lookup sends us, and what happens to it afterwards.

Overview

Each time a Perform a VLOOKUP action runs, HubSpot sends VLOOKUP a short message: which source and column to use, and the value of the property you chose in the action. That property value is the only business data we receive, and we don’t keep it.

What a lookup message contains

Most of the message is system information HubSpot adds to every custom workflow action. This example comes from a workflow that looks up contacts by postal code:

{
  "callbackId": "ap-23183481-403747942833-10-0",
  "origin": {
    "portalId": 23183481,
    "actionDefinitionId": 27217289,
    "actionDefinitionVersion": 5,
    "extensionDefinitionId": 27217289,
    "extensionDefinitionVersionId": 5
  },
  "context": {
    "source": "WORKFLOWS",
    "workflowId": 282824493
  },
  "object": {
    "objectId": 170446,
    "objectType": "CONTACT"
  },
  "inputFields": {
    "hubspotLookupField": "92867",
    "lookupSource": "8f9e28f1-c9df-4878-9541-4281f23c58c5",
    "lookupSourceColumn": "3"
  }
}

The fields that matter to you:

Field	What it is
`portalId`	Your HubSpot account ID. We receive messages from many HubSpot accounts; this tells us which customer the lookup is for.
`lookupSource`	The ID of the CSV or Google Sheets source you chose in the action.
`lookupSourceColumn`	Which column of that source to return.
`hubspotLookupField`	The value of the property you chose in the action — here, a postal code. VLOOKUP looks for it in column 1 of the source and returns the chosen column from the matching row.

What happens to the message

We hold the message in a queue just long enough to read your source and send the result back to the workflow in your HubSpot account. Once that succeeds, we delete the message. We don’t store any of the information it contains.