With the added flexibility of storing data in Custom Objects, your customers can automatically be shown information such as recent orders they’ve made, and they’ll be able to select from this object data and even take actions on it such as canceling an order.

First, head over to Custom object data in your settings and create a new Custom Object with any fields you require - like price, rating, etc.

Next, head over to your Conversation data in your settings and create a new reference from conversation to your object - in this example, we called our object Order. Here, turn on the "Allow referencing multiple Orders" toggle as one conversation can have multiple orders that it references. Learn more about setting up references with Custom Objects

Then, go to People data and create a new reference to your Orders object. Here also, turn on the "Allow referencing multiple Orders" toggle as one person can have multiple orders that they placed.

The next step is to set up your Custom Action that will fetch the data and store it into the Order object.

When setting up your action, select the references we created in step 2 in the Update references from People or Conversations to Order section of the Response set up:

Head over to AI and Automation > Workflows and click + New workflow.

Create a Workflow from scratch and choose a trigger such as "Customer opens a new conversation in the Messenger".

Finish setting up the trigger rules and then click Save and close to start building your Workflow. Now you can customize the welcome path and reply buttons.

For example, from a reply button you could add a path which allows the user to see their orders. In this path, click on the + button and choose Custom Action (using API).

From the dropdown, choose your Custom Action and then add a fail path to give users some context in case your Custom Action fails to complete.

Then, click on the + button again and this time, choose Buttons from Custom Objects.

Adding buttons from Custom Objects will present you with the following fields to complete:

Click on Select data and in the draw, select:

Next, click on Save selection to and then + Link Conversation to Order.

This will bring you back to Conversation data where you can click + Create attribute and create a new reference to the Order object that will store the selected selection from your Workflow.

Now go back to your Workflow tab and Save changes then refresh the page to pick the newly created reference attribute:

When the user selects an order, this will save their selection to the Selected order reference and you can display data from that object directly in your Workflow messages.

To do that, add a path from the Select data button (Orders > Item_name in this example). Then, you can click on the attribute selector {..} button and choose the appropriate attribute you want to show.

And that's it! Set your Workflow live and you're good to go 🎉

Once your users start interacting with your Workflow, you'll want to see what orders did the Custom Action return for their request and what order did they pick.

You can do that by looking the conversation details sidebar. In this example. all fetched orders for the conversation will appear under the "Orders for Conversation" reference attribute and the selected order is stored under "Selected Order":

You can read more about Custom object data in the Inbox here.