🚀 Exploring ServiceNow Flow Designer: Best Practices & Insights

[JOSAFK]

Hi ServiceNow Community! 

I wanted to open a discussion and share some thoughts on Flow Designer, and also learn from your experiences.

As we all know, Flow Designer is an incredibly powerful tool for automating processes without writing code, and it’s been a game changer for building maintainable, scalable workflows in ServiceNow.

 What I love about Flow Designer:

• Low-code, intuitive interface: Great for both technical and non-technical users.

• Reusability with subflows: Helps keep flows modular and easier to maintain.

• Rich integration capabilities: With spokes and integration actions, connecting to external systems is so much simpler.

• Testing and debugging: The built-in testing capabilities really help reduce back-and-forth.

 A few best practices I’ve been following:

• Always define clear naming conventions for flows, subflows, and actions to make them easily identifiable.

• Use subflows wherever possible to avoid duplication and improve reusability.

• Keep actions small and focused to improve readability and maintenance.

• Document each flow properly — including triggers, conditions, and expected outcomes — so that future developers (or even yourself!) can quickly understand the logic.

• Use data streams wisely to handle large data sets efficiently.

 I'd love to hear from the community:

• What tips and tricks do you use to optimize Flow Designer?

• How do you handle error handling and rollback scenarios in complex flows?

• Any specific design patterns or real-world use cases you'd like to share?

Looking forward to learning from all your experiences! Let's make Flow Designer workflows even more robust and user-friendly together. 

Thanks in advance for sharing! 

[Rafael Batistot · Accepted solution]

Hi @JOSAFK 

I’m not a big fan of flow designer it’s because in my daily routine I use to create incident via inbound email 

Why I’m not a fan? In this specific process is possible to add a condition by subject like 

Subject contains / start with… 

in this specific case you need add many key words to trigger the flow 

Ex.  the subject is : My Report

If the user send my report the trigger doesn’t work and you need to add other condition

for this specific case, to work, you need to create many conditions with the same phase: 

My Report 

my report 

my reports 

my Report 

My report 

Imagine if you need to create many flow with different phases? 

To complete my point, that I’m not a fan,

the flow designer is only table that is not possible create trigger and flow via script, different than workflow 

Anyway I hope some engineers from ServiceNow see my post and fix it 

[Rafael Batistot · Accepted solution]

Hi @JOSAFK 

I’m not a big fan of flow designer it’s because in my daily routine I use to create incident via inbound email 

Why I’m not a fan? In this specific process is possible to add a condition by subject like 

Subject contains / start with… 

in this specific case you need add many key words to trigger the flow 

Ex.  the subject is : My Report

If the user send my report the trigger doesn’t work and you need to add other condition

for this specific case, to work, you need to create many conditions with the same phase: 

My Report 

my report 

my reports 

my Report 

My report 

Imagine if you need to create many flow with different phases? 

To complete my point, that I’m not a fan,

the flow designer is only table that is not possible create trigger and flow via script, different than workflow 

Anyway I hope some engineers from ServiceNow see my post and fix it 

[AlhussainiM]

I think you can integrate with any AI to solve this problem ,
AI can  identify if the keyword is related to your subject or no .

[Andrew_Johnson]

I am no expert.  You can use business rule to trigger a subflow and pass the subject if needed.  It is hard to say what the best approach without knowing the full requirements.  Here is a link that may help: https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/reference/api/zurich/server/sn_fd-namespace/ScriptableFlow...

[Andrew_Johnson · Accepted solution]

Hello @JOSAFK 

 I prefer Flow Designer for its performance and ease of use, and I’ve recently started incorporating Decision Tables to reduce branching and improve reusability.

I am currently automating Change Task dependencies. The requirement is to allow users to dictate dependencies based on Task Type and Order.

In this logic:

Task Type acts as the primary filter.

Order determines execution sequence: Tasks with the same Order value run in parallel, while the Flow progresses through different Order values in ascending sequence.

To manage this:

I’m using an After Business Rule on change_task to trigger a Subflow when the State or Order changes.

I also need a Before Business Rule to act as a validation layer. Since Flow Designer doesn’t provide "pre-save" governance, this BR will prevent users from saving records that don't meet specific dependency criteria.