What's new with Flow Designer in Rome

#Rome Release , #Rome , #Flow Designer

Earl Duque

3 minute read

Rome is upon us! Today we are going to look at what is changing in Flow Designer. Be sure to check out the Rome Release Resources post to see what else is coming in Rome and how to upgrade your PDI. Check out the release notes for Flow Designer here and all of Rome’s release notes here.

Performance

Especially on large flows (as in, flows that have more than 100 actions), you will see loading times in Rome that are four times faster than in Quebec! Other places like clicking on the done button and opening an action will see similar (or faster!) speed increases.

Flow Usability

The action interface has received an update, both visually and functionally. For read-only actions, you will no longer see buttons that are disabled.

Before:

usabilitybefore.png

After:

usabilityafter.png

The execution details screen also has been updated with zebra striping to make the tables and rows easier to read.

zebra.png

New input types

Getting closer and closer to feature parity with the platform! In Rome, actions can now have the input and output types of condition, Document ID, template value, and field list.

You can even make them dependent on another sibling input. For example, input 1 on an action could be a table type, and input 2 could be a condition type. The condition picker for input 2 will change depending on what table is chosen in input 1.

Validation of invalid catalog item variables

Before, you could still activate a flow even if it is utilizing a catalog item variable that has been deleted or deactivated, which would produce errors or unexpected results. In Rome, if you delete or deactivate a variable from a catalog item that the flow was using, the flow will immediately let you know if there is a problem and prevent the flow from activation.

variableerror.png

Flow designer error handling!

User designated error handling is now available in Rome!

In actions

Individual steps now have codes and statuses that can be used elsewhere in the action (ie. via data pills). Each step also now has “if this step fails” options of “don’t stop this action and go to the next step” or “Stop the action and go to error evaluation.”

errorstep.png

In error evaluation you can use conditions to determine if the overall action was a success or failure and output specific codes and statuses to your flow.

In flows and subflows

Along with having access to action statuses and codes, flows and subflows now all have a section where you can add steps to execute if an error occurs during the flow.

errorhandler.png

Some use cases:

  • Send error messages to the log
  • Create an incident when an integration step fails
  • Assign additional tasks to a request item

Let us know

Let us know in the comments below what your favorite change to Flow Designer is in Rome. Share some more use-cases, too!

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