Flow Designer - Glitch with "Get Catalog Variables" or Not Using Properly?

[Marc D]

Hello, everyone. Today, one of my co-workers was working on Flows in Flow Designer when he noticed a problem. He has used the action "Get Catalog Variables" in the past with no issues, but an issue happened today. Every Single Line Text variable he retrieves with "Get Catalog Variables" is returned as a reference instead of a string, and this is happening across every flow within the system. Here is a condensed screenshot as an example:

The result is that he cannot map these variables to String fields. In addition, when he attempted to work-around this by using dot-walking in a script block, it would grey out these data pills and not allow him to actually dot-walk.

He has tried repairing and updating 7 different plugins, but none fixed the issue.

Is there suddenly a glitch in the system? Is there a way around this? Were we using them improperly this whole time? Any advice would be helpful.

[Ankur Bawiskar]

@Marc D 

did you recently upgrade?

if yes and issue started coming after it, better to raise a case with ServiceNow

💡 If my response helped, please mark it as correct ✅ and close the thread 🔒— this helps future readers find the solution faster! 🙏

[Marc D · Accepted solution]

My co-worker did get an answer back from ServiceNow. Apparently this is because somehow, the Glide Object definition for String got deleted from the instance. Not only did we not know that this was possible, we also found it weird that it seemingly only affected Flow Designer and not any scripts.

It's been fixed on our end now. Will be closing this.