Flow Designer and Input via Variables

[sjohanse]

After recently updating to London we are eager to explore the Flow Designer more to see where we can benefit using that as it seems like a great addition. The Flow Designer is meant to be an easy intuitive tool to use and for the most basic stuff it might fulfill that, but once you have a more real-life business challenge gathering information on how that could be done.

In our particular case we have to through a Service Catalog Request gather information from users in a series of steps. We were therefore looking at using flow-specific catalog variables to get data from user and creating the tasks for the steps based on that. Unfortunately the SN docs on this is very basic and does not really explain anything on how to setup and gather the value of these variables. We also tried searching the community site, but no clear results came up.

Does anyone know of any good source of information on the flow designer and how to go about designing something like what is described above?

Any tips are appreciated.

Regards, Stig

[Arnoud Kooi]

Do you plugin com.glideapp.servicecatalog.flow_designer activated?

After that you should be able to use the Create Catalog Task action

[sjohanse]

Thanks for the reply. We do indeed have the plugin activated and we are aware of the Create Catalog Task action. But even if we create a catalog task and assign flow variables to that we do not see how we can use that to gather input from the originator of the request (or another user) that do not have the ITIL-role. This is where we hoped there would be some more documentation.

[Arnoud Kooi]

Im not sure how you would like to design your process, what would be the flow and way of interacting with the user you have in mind?

[sjohanse]

Basically we need something like this:

• User creates a request
• First catalog task 'Gathering of Required Information' created automatically
• We assign the request, and the first catalog task, to the person responsible for overall fulfillment
• Assigned to communicates with requesting user, or another user, to gather the required data
• • This is where we hope to gather this data into variables so that we can use on subsequent tasks
  • It would be perfect if the user could enter in the flow variable data by accessing any type of form (catalog task, email, ....). This is where we are trying to find ideas
• Once the required data is gathered and the first catalog task is set as completed the next catalog tasks should be created automatically
• • For each of these a subset of the required data is needed as input
  • Some tasks are optional based on part of the information gathered

The issue here is that the information required to fulfill the request is not available at the time the request is created and might even come from another user than the user who created the request.

As the flow designer seems perfect for implementing the logic (easier than in a workflow) we hoped to use that. But if we cannot use it to gather more information from the user then....