“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow.”
— Mary Tyler Moore
Last time, we modified and tested the automated example Subflow using our new approach, so now we have to do the same thing with our manual example. Because we are now creating our Catalog Task in the primary Flow, much of the work that was previously done in the earlier version of the Subflow has now been moved to the primary Flow, so there won’t be much left to do in the manual version of the Subflow. In fact, it may even be possible to create a generic Subflow that would handle all manual implementations. For now, though, let’s just create one specifically for our example and we can explore that possibility at some later point.
Under our new approach with two parallel tracks (one for the task creation and the other for launching the type-specific Subflow), we cannot put any post-task-closure logic in our Subflow since the wait logic is in one track and the Subflow is running independently in another. In our original example, once the task closed we pulled the password out of a catalog variable and then removed that value from the variable so it would not be left on the records after processing. We still need to do this, but since it cannot be done in the Subflow, we will have to move these steps to the primary Flow. And since the password was originally sent back in the Subflow outputs, which will continue for all automated implementations, we need to set up a Flow Variable that can be populated from either track to make all of this work for both types.
To create a Flow Variable in the App Engine Studio, pull up the primary Flow and use the ellipses menu in the upper right-hand corner to select Flow Variables.
We will call our new variable password and set the type to String. It would be nice to set the type to Password or some other masked data type, but in the current version, that does not appear to be an option.
Now that we have our variable defined, we can populate it in both parallel branches where appropriate, and then use in the outgoing email instead of using the Subflow outputs. Under the branch that creates the Catalog Task, we can add a new step to pull the password value out of the variables linked to the task.
Now, the one thing that we do not want to do is to overlay a value provided by the other branch running the Subflow, so before we use this value to populate our new variable, we will want to make sure that a value is there. To do that, we add a simple If condition.
Once we know that a password was provided, indicating a manually fulfilled request, we then use that value to populate our Flow Variable.
That should take care of the first parallel branch. Now we need to do something similar for the second branch. After we run our Subflow, we can pull the password value returned by the Subflow and use it to populate our new variable.
Now we just need to go into the step that sends out the email containing the password and change the source of the email body from the Subflow outputs to the new variable.
That should take care of all of changes for the primary Flow. In fact, virtually all of the work that was done in the original manual example Subflow has now been moved to the primary Flow, so there isn’t much left to do in the Subflow. Let’s pull that guy up now and strip out everything that we are now handling in the Flow and see what’s left.
As you can see, the only thing left in the Subflow is to assign the Subflow outputs. This would indicate that we could do yet another redesign and have either a generic manual Subflow, or make the Subflow optional and only include one if the fulfillment is automated. We could add the owner instructions to the type record, fetch both the password and the success/failure from the task, and then even the automated Subflows would have no need for outputs. They would communicate to the primary Flow via the task record. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s see if all of this works as it is. Now that we have modified the primary Flow, we will need to retest both the automated example and the manual example to see if they both work. That sounds like a good subject for our next installment.
