Lab: 1563 - Move out of Workflow Editor and into Flow Designer

[darren_halliday]

Wednesday 12:30-2:10 - Location: Casanova 502 - Level 1

Thursday 10:30-12:10 - Location: Casanova 605 - Level 1

This Lab will compare the automation engines of Workflow and Flow and provide good reasons for moving over to Flow and how you might achieve this.

Looking forward to meeting you all this Wednesday and Thursday!

Use this article to pose your questions.

Hi everyone, I demonstrated a Flow and Action that made an API call to a REST service that brought back JSON data and imported Countries into a custom table.  Please see attached the Update Set if you want to try it.  Please note before you commit the Update Set you must install the JSON Parser plugin.

Regards

Darren

[LS7]

Why do ServiceNow Instances come with both Workflow & Flow Designer?

Workflow has been around since the beginning of the platform and supports a fair amount of current automation in the platform. Flow Designer is a newer addition and was created to support admins/process owners who may not be as comfortable coding all interactions. 

Workflow and Flow Designer flows co-exist just fine in the platform. There is no need to rewrite current workflows into flow designer flows. However, if a workflow is going to be revised or redesigned, consider taking the opportunity to build the newer version in Flow Designer. Any new flows should be built in Flow Designer to make use of the enhancements and lessons learned from Workflow.

Workflow is not going away any time soon. ServiceNow will continue to support Workflow for as long as there are workflows needing to run. With that said, ServiceNow is not adding anything new to Workflow. All new development and enhancement efforts are being done to Flow Designer.

[Laura12]

There was a question in the 12:30pm session on May 17 about sending the comments from the approval to the user.  I've used this when sending a rejection email as comments are usually within the rejection.

To do this you have to look up approval record from the sysapproval_approver table and use the conditions approval = the request item and state = rejected.  Your next step in the flow would be to send the email to the requester.  In the details of the email, I use the data pill picker to go to that lookup record >  approval record > comments.

I've added some screenshots of my flow.

[jonathan_luste]

Can we get access to the slide deck used for the lab?

[LS7]

Some Flow Designer Resources:

Developer Portal 

Prod Docs 

Flow Designer reference details

Now Learning:  Flow Designer Essentials, Flow Designer Administration, Flow Designer Error Handling

[LS7]

Does Flow Designer have the ability to do everything that Workflow can do?

At this time, with the exception of rollback, Flow Designer has reached equivalency with Workflow. For the more complex situations, you may need to build the flow using flow logic. More info on the various logic options can be found here = https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-build-workflows/page/administer/flow-designer/concept/flow-l...

[LS7]

Custom Actions

A custom action is a reusable component to automate a sequence of related steps as part of a process. Publish actions to activate them, which makes them available to activated flows. Actions can be associated with spokes to make them easier to manage.

Action Designer - Building custom actions

Create an Action

Working with Spokes

Working with a custom action

The process to see the list of flows that include a custom action and determine the impact that changes to an action have on published and draft flows can be found in this document:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/utah-build-workflows/page/administer/flow-designer/task/see-relat...

This is also useful if you want to delete an custom action, as actions that are in any active flow cannot be deleted.

[LS7]

Flow Diagram View

You can see the paths a flow can follow and the connections between elements. You can also build your flow in the diagram view, if working graphically is better for you.

Flow Diagramming plugin from the Store.

[LS7]

Spokes

Add application-specific content to Flow Designer by installing spokes. A spoke is a scoped application containing Flow Designer content dedicated to a particular application or record type. 

Integration Hub Standard spokes are available to new customers as part of an IntegrationHub Professional subscription. Existing customers can use the spokes as part of an IntegrationHub Standard subscription. A list of spokes for each subscription level can be found here.

A good place to start reading for more details is the Request Integration Hub document in Prod Docs.

[LS7]

Flow Designer and Domain Separation

Flow Designer does support and follow domain separation rules. For details and design considerations, look at the following document: Domain separation and Flow Designer.

[darren_halliday]

There was a question today on how you create Spokes.  Here is my understanding.  You create a Scope App to hold your Flow Actions.  So lets say I want to make a set of Flow Actions for DateLogic (e.g. FirsTMondayOfMonth, EasterMonday etc).  So I would create a Scoped App called DateLogic and write my Actions in that Scope.  When creating a Flow you will see your Scope as a Spoke with the Actions therein.

Darren