Create Flow to add color metadata

Topic summary

A user is building a Shopify Flow to automatically populate product color metadata based on tags like “primary-black”. The workflow triggers when a product is added and should extract the color from the tag to update a metaobject.

Current Issue:

  • Flow returns error: “Value can’t be blank” when attempting to update the metafield
  • The user modified code from an attached video tutorial (starting at 6:45) but lacks coding experience
  • Created a color metaobject that includes title, hexcode, and jpg fields

Technical Details:

  • User’s current code attempts to assign color metadata by replacing “-primary” from product tags
  • Question raised: Should each detail from the metaobject (color name, hexcode, jpg presence) be added individually?

Response:

  • Another user notes that metafields generally cannot be set to empty values, suggesting the blank value issue is the root cause

Status: Unresolved; troubleshooting the empty value error and proper metaobject reference structure

Summarized with AI on November 8. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

You generally can’t set metafields to an empty value.