Chapter 12 - Flow Design Overview Flashcards
What is flower designer?
-Non-technical interface for building/enabling process automation capabilities (i.e. flows).
-Flows automate business logic for a particular application or process such as approvals, tasks, notifications and record operations.
-It helps you build time-saving apps quicker.
-Benefits:
-Centralized: Flow designer provides a single environment to build/visualize business processes.
-Robust: Flow designer provides configuration/runtime info to create, operate and troubleshoot flows from a single interface.
-User friendly: Flow designer provides natural-language descriptions of flow logic.
-Repeatable: Flow designers promote process automation by enabling subject matter experts to develop/share reusable actions.
-Scalable: Flow Designer allows extending flow content by subscribing to integration Hub or installing spokes.
When is flower designer used?
Do Use:
-To orchestrate business processes across services with little technical user knowledge.
-To reduce technical debt; meaning reduce scripting to simplify upgrades/deployments
-To integrate with 3rd party systems
Do not use:
-Existing logic already developed using ServiceNow workflow editor
-ServiceNow instance is running Jakarta or prior
Real world use cases:
-Project manager has tasks automatically created and added to a visual task board when a specific record is created.
-Customer service develops a flow to communicate incident resolution through the end-user support channel.
-Change manager creates an outage record and links it t o an incident when the primary email server goes offline
How is flow designer accessed?
-Search for ‘Flow’ > Select ‘Flower Designer’ under ‘Process Automation’
-Since Flow Designer is separate from the Now platform UI, it opens in a different browser tab.
-On the Flow Designer landing page, tabs at the top list the existing flows, sub flows, actions, executions and help menus.
-Note: You can create new flows, sub flows and actions using the ‘+ New’ button.
Ex. The VTB Sample Flow will be opened. When an incident is created with a Priority of 1-Critical, this flow creates a new freeform Visual Task Board and adds the incident as a card within the To Do lane.
-Each flow consists of a trigger and one or more actions.
-Triggers: A flow consists of a Trigger. When the conditions of the trigger are met, the flow will execute the actions.
-Actions: Actions are executed when the trigger conditions are met. Each action is a reusable operation that enables process analysts to automate Now Platform features without having to write code.
-Different actions are strung together to make a flow.
-Integrations:
-You can expand the flow designer solution to integrate with external instances and third-party apps with a separate subscription to integration Hub.
-The integrations available using Integration Hub are referred to as spokes.
-They add powerful new sets of actions to Flow Designer without the need to write a script.
What is the flower designer help panel and how do you access it?
-To open (and close) the Flow Designer help panel, select the question mark in the main header.
-The help panel offers info about working with data/spokes, building actions/flows and guided tours.
What is the process automation design for flow design/benefits?
-Process owners are able to author cross-enterprise workflows within a single, unified process.
-The process automation designer allows you to organize content built in Flow Designer and unify cross-enterprise processes. Benefits include:
-Connecting multiple flows/actions
-Guiding end users to complete a process in a task-oriented interface
-Consolidate separate business processes across your organization
-Defining a consistent record lifecycle from beginning to end
-Passing data between activities/stages of business processes
-Specifying the conditions/order for activities/stages
-Visualizing/managing activities and stages in Kanban-style board
How to initiate a flower with triggers?
-Triggers start a flow when the conditions are met and they can be record-based, schedule-based or application based.
-Record-based:
-Record-based triggers run a flow after a record has been created, updated or deleted.
-When using a record-based trigger, the triggering record can be used later in the flow as input for actions.
-Schedule-based:
-Schedule-based triggers run a flow at the specified date/time: daily, weekly, monthly etc.
-The execution time can be used as an input for actions in the flow.
-Application-based:
-These triggers are added when the associated application spoke is activated.
-Ex. These types of triggers allow you to trigger a flow when an item is requested from the Service Catalog.
-In some instances, a plug-in might need to be activated as well (ex. Flow Designer Support for Service Catalog)
What are trigger conditions?
-Specific conditions can be set to identify when a flow should be instantiated by the trigger.
-The VTB Sample Flow example:
-Uses a record-based trigger.
-It initiates the flow when a new incident record is created with a Priority of 1-Critical.
-Trigger: Record/schedule/application based
-Table, date, or application field:
-When the trigger selected is record-based, a table can be specified. It will be watched for changes that could meet the condition.
-Schedule/application based triggers will change this field to the appropriate date/time or application field.
-Condition: Specify all of the conditions that must be met for the flow to be triggered.
-When to run the flow: Specify the type of session and which users can start a flow.
-Where to run the flow: Specify if the flow will run in the background or in the current session.
What is flow designer actions?
-Actions: Operations executed by Flow Designer, such as looking up a record, updating a field value, requesting an approval or logging a value.
-Actions: All about reusability of operations across multiple flows.
-Ex. Send email action would be helpful in several different types of flows.
-Installed spoke: Each installed spoke can house several actions. Look over every spoke to see if an action is available before building your own custom action.
-Action titles: Convey the operation the action does.
-Note: Action is very broad/generic in nature. The titles reflect that.
-Ex. The ‘Create Record’ action is for creating all records, not just a specific table. The specific table the record will be created on is defined in the options of the actions.
–Action description: The spoke/action title can help you get a sense of what an action does. However, you may need more info, so be sure to look over the description of an action.
What are some frequently used actions contained in the spoke ServiceNow core?
Ask for approval:
Create approvals on any record, including rules for an approval, rejection or cancellation, in addition to specifying a Due Date.
Create Record:
Create a record on any table with configurable fields and field values.
Delete Record:
Delete a record on any table.
Look Up Record:
Look up a single record on any table, confirming whether or not it exists. You can use the info from the record in subsequent actions within the flow. The record will be available for selection in the Data panel on the far right of the Flow Designer layout.
Look Up Records:
Flow Designer Look Up Records action, it looks up multiple records on any table using defined conditions.
Wait for Condition:
Pause the flow until the record conditions are met.
Ex. Wait for the state to change to be resolved.
Describe the flow designer data process.
Pass data between actions:
-The Data section of the Flow Designer contains data pills that can be used in subsequent actions
-To reference the data stored in the data pill, drag/drop the data pill from the Data section to the appropriate field in the flow.
-Data Pill - passed into flow:
-When a data pill is dragged to a field, the flow will indicate if the data pill can be used or not.
-This instant feedback helps you pick only valid data.
-Note: Related fields like the table will be automatically populated.
-Data Pill Picker:
-Provides an alternative way to select data pills from the data panels into the flow.
-The Data Pill Picker can be a faster way to select data when dot-walking to another table is required.
-Data panel: This panel contains data pills that are available to be passed into the flow.
-Expand/collapse the data panel: This panel can be collapsed/expanded.
-Data Pill - Data Panel:
-Flow Designer adds a data pill to store its results when an action is added to a flow.
-The data pill name indicates its sequence in the flow and its data type.
Describe the flow designer data process. (Part 2)
-When designing a flow, you can use the results of an action as inputs for other flows, actions or sub flows.
-Note: Use the sequence value shown in the corresponding section of the Data panel (trigger, 1, 2, 3) to ensure you’re using the correct data pill as an input value.
-Records shown in the Data panel can be expanded to show or select their corresponding fields.
Ex. The Incident Record in the Data panel can be expanded to select any of its fields for use in an action.
-When a flow runs an action, it generates the data pill runtime value, which remains the same for the duration of the flow.
Ex. A data pill for [Trigger > Incident Record] always contains the incident record values from when the flow started.
-When using the Data Pill Picker icon, use the arrow keys to dot-walk to fields in other tables.
Ex. Below it starts with the Incident record Assignment group field. Then dot-walks to select the Assignment group Name from the Group table.
