When I wrote about Collections last month, I also shared a few shortcuts for adding items to a database. Those shortcuts were a bit lengthy because they required me to add two actions for each value I wanted to update. There wasn’t any way to update multiple values at once.

It was a minor pain point, but I’m happy to see that it’s been addressed. The app’s latest update includes a new Update Values with Dictionary action that allows you to set multiple values at once. It’s as simple as adding a Dictionary action, setting the attributes to be updated as the dictionary’s keys, and adding each attribute’s data as its corresponding value. Then a single Update Values with Dictionary action will make all of those changes in the database.

This makes it quicker and simpler to create shortcuts for Collections. Here is the original shortcut I shared for adding a new item to my database of MacStories articles I’ve edited:

And this is what the shortcut looks like now:

As you can see, the updated version of the shortcut is much cleaner, and it took me no time at all to set up the dictionary for updating values. This is an action I’ll be taking advantage of a lot in my future use of Collections.

If you’d like to take a closer look at how this new action works, you can download the updated version of my Collections shortcut.