Have you ever wondered how to ensure governance in relation to workflows created in flow designer? Have you ever wondered how to ensure that unique simple flows don’t explode which will be unbearable to maintain in the long run?
Then look no further – here is an approach to create a flow to be utilized across multiple catalog item for simple mere generic flows.
Why doesn’t it work OOTB?
When using the action “Get catalog variables”, you are binding the single workflow together with the sc_cat_item itself, hence, if you would like to use it with multiple catalog items, it will simply not work, as you can't map one flow to several items.
A solution to overcome this obstacle is to not use the action “get catalog variables”, but instead script the inputs to get the variables e.g.:
This simple code will give you the requester from the catalogue item based on the variable within the single catalogue item. So, if you ensure to be consistent e.g. by utilizing variable sets as a defined standard, you will be able to get the requester from multiple catalogue items utilizing same workflow, the variable name just need to be the same. The script itself can be as simple or as complex as you would like, but the main idea is the same.
Above is quite simple but extremely useful across an organization for many different but simple catalog items.
