Today we will explore a method I've recently developed while looking over the Network Requests generated while a flow is loaded in Flow Designer.
After a long research through the tables that "make" a flow , I've realised there is no way you can actually find any details of the way an action is configured(eg. an "Update Record" action type).
That made me think that , somehow , Flow Designer dynamically builds the flow when we load it.But how does that happen ?
My investigation started with investigating the HTML tree to see if I can find any relevant table name where any helpful information might be stored.Nothing found.
After, I went through most of the Network Requests generated while a flow is loaded.
Well , without anymore suspense , this was it! Finally found it .
Turns out Servicenow uses this internal endpoint "https://{YOUR-INSTANCE-NAME}.service-now.com/api/now/processflow/flow/{FLOW-SYS-ID}?sysparm_transaction_scope=global" to dynamically generate the mapping between Actions and Inputs.
The response after this Network Request is done is a JSON full of informations.
For my interest , the most relevant keys inside the JSON are :
1)actionInstances ---> keeps mapping for actions like : Create Record , Update Record , Look up record etc.
Relevant data inside an element of actionInstances : actionType -> Update Record ; inputs -> see on what table Update is against and what values are updated
2)flowLogicInstances ---> keeps mapping for logic actions like : If , For Each ,Set Flow Variable etc.
Now , what can you do with this ?
A simple use case (yet saves loads and loads of time) : We need to find out , what flow adds Additional Comments on the incident table.
With this method ? Simple as it sounds!
1)Create a script that iterates through all the flows by querying sys_hub_flow (of course you can limit the flows that you want to search based on table).
2)For each flow make a call to the newly discovered endpoint(add basic auth also) :
var request = new sn_ws.RESTMessageV2();
request.setHttpMethod('get');
request.setEndpoint('https://{YOUR-INSTANCE-NAME}.service-now.com/api/now/processflow/flow/{FLOW-SYS-ID}?sysparm_transaction_scope=global');
request.setBasicAuth('{ADMIN-USER-NAME}', '{USER-PASSWORD}');
response = request.execute();
httpResponseStatus = response.getStatusCode();
var body = response.getBody();
//ans will have the body with all the relevant data.
var ans = JSON.parse(body);
//I recommend you first gs.info(JSON.stringify(ans)); so you can see the structure and decide what to do after.3)Manipulate the data as you wish and get the relevant information from it.
That's all I wanted to share 😄
Thanks for reading and I hope this will help someone and spare your time going through all flows and checking all Actions.
