Store and Retrieve Workflow Data

J. Kevin Wolfe has written a very concise overview of how Automator passes information from action to action, and how to “trick” it into storing data for later use:

“To store references, use the Copy to Clipboard action from System Library. Place this after the results you need to store. Then to call it up, place a Run AppleScript action in the workflow with the following scriptlet before the action that needs the data from earlier in the workflow:

--Return Clipboard Contents to Data Flow 
return (the clipboard)

This takes the information stored on the clipboard and puts it back in the Data Flow.”