pluck_skill

Overview

This skill extracts a single scalar field value from each Note in a Collection and returns a new Collection of Notes containing those values. It supports dot-notation paths for nested fields (for example, metadata.uri). The result excludes Notes that do not contain the requested field.

How this skill works

Given a target Collection of JSON/dict Notes and a field path string, the skill iterates each Note and reads the specified key. If the key exists and its value is a scalar, the skill emits a new Note containing that value under the requested output variable. Notes that lack the field or violate the type contract are skipped; an empty output simply indicates no matches.

When to use it

• You need a single top-level or nested value from each Note (e.g., titles, URIs, timestamps).
• You want to transform a Collection of record objects into a Collection of scalar values for downstream processing.
• You need to produce a list of fetchable URLs or identifiers for subsequent tasks.
• You must filter out Notes that don’t contain a specific field without raising an error.

Best practices

• Ensure the target is a Collection of dict/JSON Notes (use split to convert array Notes into a Collection first).
• Specify nested fields using dot notation (metadata.uri, metadata.title).
• Confirm the field exists in each Note; missing fields are silently excluded rather than causing failure.
• Avoid using pluck on Notes whose field values are arrays — split arrays into separate Notes before plucking.
• Treat an empty result as a valid outcome indicating no matches, not as an execution error.

Example use cases

• Extract metadata.title from a Collection of paper Notes to build a title index.
• Pluck metadata.uri values to create a Collection of URLs for a web fetcher or downloader.
• Retrieve text fields from search results to feed into a summarization pipeline.
• Collect char_count values from document Notes for size-based filtering or batching.