Flow Designer

Andrew Barnes

2 minute read

Payload Builder A handy new feature in Madrid is the payload builder. This allows for reasonably simple name-value pairs payloads to be crafted into a payload object. The ability to use the inputs combined with a payload builder lowers the bar for building dynamic integration actions.

You can see the Name-Value pair setup is pretty straight forward using the data pill setup that is now familiar in Flow/Action Designer.

Andrew Barnes

3 minute read

Decision Tables The first feature in Madrid I am going to highlight is Decision Tables. These decision tables are a place to store the decision logic for variable situations. Each decision table record (sys_decision) handles a single decision. Related lists are the decision inputs (sys_decision_input) and decision (sys_decision_question) records. Each decision record contains an answer.

Our example will be for routing after hours service calls. We take multiple inputs in the form of location, time of submission, and the service.

Dave Slusher

7 minute read

Flow Designer is a great tool to create business logic, particularly by those outside of traditional development roles: process owners, subject matter experts and the like. However, it is almost certain that sooner or later they will want to create Flows that require Actions that do not exist in the baseline system nor easily available Spokes. So then what? My suggestion is that this is where the traditional developers should step in, by creating Actions for use by those business users who don’t want to get deep in the implementation details.

Dave Slusher

3 minute read

As Flow Designer gets more real world use, the feature set continues to evolve towards the needs of production customers. In the London release, one of those features is Subflows. By its nature, Flow Designer is pleasingly fractal in nature. You build a Flow out of Actions. When you drill into Actions, the UI looks almost the same as the Action Steps build into the Action. Subflows are another layer of this fractal, allowing for reuse by building a piece of a Flow that can be reused in multiple Flows or even across the same Flow.

Andrew Barnes

2 minute read

Share Spotlight Welcome to the second share spotlight! Every Friday we will be spotlighting a project from the Share site on the Developer Portal. Add to Update Set For the second installment, we are featuring a project called Add to Update Set Utility authored by friend of the Developer Program Ben Hollifield. This project adds a Global UI Action to place items into your current update set that might not normally be saved to an update set.

Dave Slusher

2 minute read

Share Spotlight we are beginning a new feature here on the Developer Blog. Every Friday we will be spotlighting a project from the Share site on the Developer Portal. We dug deep and decided to call this “Share Spotlight”. Show Flow Context For the first installment, we are featuring a project called Show Flow Context authored by friend of the Developer Program Tom Cullen. This project does one thing, which is to add a UI Action to Task based records to show active Flows for that record.

Dave Slusher

4 minute read

It is ServiceNow new release season! With the London release in Early Access, we will cover some of the features newly available to application developers. In this post, I will discuss one very specific topic - new ways in which Flows can be initiated. When originally released in Kingston, there were two ways to start a flow: on change or insert of a record or via a schedule. That has expanded, increasing the flexibility of Flow logic.

Josh Nerius

5 minute read

In New for Developers in Kingston - Flow Designer, Action Designer, IntegrationHub, I touched on the basics of Flow Designer. In this post, I’ll spend some time exploring Flow Designer in more detail. Instead of trying to look at every aspect of Flow Designer in one post (that’d be a long post), I’m going to walk you through the process of creating a simple flow and we’ll touch on many of the core concepts in the process.

Josh Nerius

4 minute read

I’m always excited about every ServiceNow release, but Kingston brings some game changing stuff. This post is a high level overview of three new Kingston features that aren’t just ridiculously cool, they may just change the way you think about development in ServiceNow: Flow Designer, Action Designer and IntegrationHub. Note: for a deeper dive into Flow Designer, see Getting Started with Flow Designer . That intro sounds like click-bait, but I don’t think I’m exaggerating.