“First, solve the problem. Then, write the code.”
— John Johnson
Today we need to build out the Subflow that we referenced in the Script Include function that we built last time out. To create a new Subflow, open up the Flow Designer, click on the New button to bring up the selection list, and select Subflow from the list.
When the initial form pops up, all you really need to enter is the name of the Subflow, which we already referred to in our Script Include function as New_Collaboration_Store_Instance.
Once you submit the initial properties form, the new Subflow will appear in the list of Subflows, and from there you can bring it up in full edit mode. In edit mode, we can add the one Input to the Subflow, the name of the new instance.
Since we will be launching this Subflow to run on its own in the background, there is no need for any Outputs.
Once we configure the Inputs and Outputs, we can move on to the steps of the Subflow. Our first step will be to gather up all of the records in the table of instances except for two: the Host instance, which has already been updated, and the new instance, which already knows about itself.
We select the Look Up Records Action, select the Member Organization table, and then define two Conditions to get the records that we want: 1) the host value is false, and 2) the instance is not the instance that we brought in as Input. It really doesn’t matter for our purposes what sequence the records come in, but I went ahead and sorted the records by instance, just so they we will always work through them in the same order.
Our next step, then is to loop through the records. We do that with a For Each Item Flow Control step, setting the items to the records obtained in the first step.
Now we have the basic structure of the Subflow; we just need to perform the tasks necessary to notify each host of the new instance, and notify the new instance of each host within the the For Each Item loop. This could all be done with additional Subflow steps, but I took the easy way out here and just built another function in our Script Include to handle the REST API calls to the instances. In fact, I built two functions, one to make the call, and another to call that function twice, once to tell the existing host about the new host, and then again to inform the new host of the existing host. To run that script, I had to create a custom Action, which is just a simple Script Action that calls the function, passing in the names of the two instances (existing, from the current record, and new, from the Subflow input). Once I built the custom Action, I was able to select it from the list and then configure it.
That completes the Subflow, but once again, we have referenced a function in our Script Include that does not exist, so we will have to get into that in our next installment.
