Updating Flows between different instance versions

[Kim Sullivan]

I feel like with the past few releases there have been issues with updating Flows between instances when they are on different versions.  In my developer lifetime, I've always upgraded DEV a few weeks before PROD to flush out any potential issues. However, with the last few releases, that has caused problems due to Flow incompatibility. 

Currently, I have a case open with support and their proposed solution is to create a new Flow in PROD if I'm not ready to upgrade.  That is preposterous!  

Question to the community and any ServiceNow devs out there - do you foresee this being an issue going forward with future releases?  If so, I'm going to have to come up with a new upgrade plan.

*Disclaimer- my DEV is Xanadu and PROD is Wash DC, so I'm not one of those holdouts still on Vancouver.

[Sandeep Rajput]

@Kim Sullivan Except ServiceNow product design team responsible for designing flow designer no one else can answer this question. Though my experience with flows between upgrades have been smooth so far. However, I have seen issues being reported around incompatibility of flow/subflows on newer releases. 

Rebuilding the flow from scratch is indeed preposterous as it would require effort for development and testing. Moving forward, I recommend you to consider some buffer in your upgrade plan for such contingencies. 

[Kim Sullivan]

Latest update from support on my case.  I hope any ServiceNow employees see this .... as I feel like its the exact opposite of what should happen with upgrades to instances.  Its almost like they are telling us now that all instances need to be upgraded at the same time -- which is ridiculous. 

Now Support ---

"We do not support importing flows from newer versions of ServiceNow to older versions of ServiceNow.
As Flow Designer is developed changes are made between releases, this can cause major issues for flows that are imported back to older versions of ServiceNow.

As long as release is same there won't be any issue moving flows from once instance to another.

Please note this is an expected behavior and documented in below doc.
https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/xanadu-application-development/page/build/system-update-sets/conc...

Warning: Update sets allow moving changes between instances that may be running different family release versions and different features. You can always load an update set created on an older family release on an instance running a newer family release. Loading an update set created on a newer family release on an instance running an older family release requires additional testing to determine compatibility. Updates from newer family releases may not produce the same functionality when moved to older family releases. In extreme cases, newer family release updates may cause outages or data loss on an older family release instance. Where possible, avoid moving updates from newer family releases to older family releases. Similar constraints apply to moving updates between instances running different versions of ServiceNow Store apps."

[Chris M3]

They have always discouraged moving any code from newer versions to old versions.  If you only have those two instances, then it sounds like you need a 'blackout' of changes while doing upgrades.  We use a separate instance to test the upgrade, typically over 2-3 months, before migrating and implementing the upgrade to DEV and PROD over about a weeks time.

Flows in particular have had their 'structure' changed with how they store data.  This means the older instance won't know how to load the updated flow.  

[Hitoshi Ozawa]

Same here. Having Flow compatibility between my DEV and PROD. I'm having to manually edit my Flow and Actions after applying updateset to make them work. This seems to be defeating the purpose of using updateset. (sigh)

In the same boat. The only choice seems to be come up with the new upgrade plan.