TechNow Ep 76 | Flow Designer/IntegrationHub 2020 Update

Chuck Tomasi · ‎05-29-2020

We show off some of our favorite Flow Designer and IntegrationHub features that were added in Madrid, New York, and Orlando. Our special guest Michael Slabodnick explains and demonstrates what's new to help you be more productive creating digital workflows. Flow Designer is a Now Platform® feature for automating processes in a single design environment. Flow Designer lets process owners use natural language to automate approvals, tasks, notifications, and record operations without coding. IntegrationHub enables execution of third-party APIs as a part of a flow when a specific event occurs in ServiceNow. These integrations, referred to as spokes, are easy to configure and enable you to quickly add powerful actions without the need to write a script.

Originally aired: June 23, 2020 8:00 AM PT

Featured Experts

Michael Slabodnick first started working on technology while troubleshooting DOS and learning how to configure EMM386 in order to play his computer games. This kicked off his career through the service desk and eventually as an ITSM process engineer. He now works at ServiceNow as a Platform Architect, having been both a customer and a consultant for an implementation partner, all of which would not be possible if he hadn't gotten rejected from dental school multiple times.

Chuck Tomasi is a Sr. TPMM for ServiceNow. He is a computer science major with over 35 years of IT experience. As a former ServiceNow customer, Chuck won the first Innovation of the Year Award at Knowledge 10. Since joining ServiceNow in 2010 as a Technical Consultant, he has done many large scale ITSM implementations and custom applications, acted as an adjunct instructor for Education Services, created and lead the Technical Best Practices program, makes appearances on Live Coding Happy Hour, created dozens of fit for purpose custom applications, and co-hosts the ServiceNow series "TechNow".

Kreg Steppe is a Training and Certification Program Manager within ServiceNow developing and supporting cloud training infrastructure. He specializes in developing integration solutions, automating repeatable processes and Cloud Management in ITOM. Kreg's prior experience includes operating his own ISP, developing web applications in PHP, network integration, managing network support, Application Development on cloud based networks, DNS and email server maintenance. He is a Linux enthusiast and enjoys Photography.

Jeremy Duncan is a Platform Architect on the Innovation team at ServiceNow. Jeremy is an Enterprise Architect with over 16 years of IT and Service Management experience. His experience and certifications span across retail and manufacturing with focuses on hardware, software, and information security specialties. He has done many implementations in both the Enterprise Federal and Commercial spaces since 2011 and brings a breadth of platform knowledge that aids him in sound architectural decisions. He achieved his B.B.A. at MTSU and majored in Information Systems. He spends his free time fighting crime as a volunteer certified police officer in North Nashville since 2012 and enjoys family time, camping, with his wife and kids!

Links Mentioned

Questions and Answers

Is there a way a while loop based on time duration can be used so that flow doesn't move forward till the condition is true?

-- Faizan Jalal

There are options for both (two different actions). Wait for condition will stop and wait for a condition (e.g. State = Closed) and Wait duration.

-- Chuck Tomasi

3. Lookup record - if a record is not found in a table, the flow designer thread breaks down and doesn't throw an exception that can be caught and flow can resume. Is there a better way to design this?

-- Faizan Jalal

A better way would be to do Look Up Records. It has a 'count' data pill that returns. If you get 0 for the count, you can do conditional (if) logic on that. If you get a number greater than 0, you use the For Each logic to get your single record.

-- Chuck Tomasi

So if I build out a flow and then you realize, "This should really be a subflow." Is there an easy way to "convert" a flow to a subflow, so that I can take advantage of the features you describe?

-- Douglas Rezabek

That's a great idea. It doesn't exist today. We'll suggest it to the product manager. You might want to reach out to your account team to ask them if you could also speak with the Flow Designer product manager for more specifics on your use case.

-- Michael Slabodnick

Is there a specific date that the ability to take the K20 courses will be removed?

-- Joseph Childers

We haven't heard when they will be disabled on nowlearning.servicenow.com. I've heard September, I've heard December. Obviously, sooner is better than later.

-- Chuck Tomasi

So we have an integration with an SCCM database which has to join multiple tables and pulls back millions of records. At present, it times out half the time. Would this be a better approach to this rather than just building a JDBC data source and transform?

-- Curtis Rowell

I would recommend using IntegrationHub. It has retry policies as well. You might also want to look at ways to do "deltas" on your subsequent imports after you have your first import done. If 1% of the data is changing daily, you don't need the millions of records each night, right? Talk to your account team's solution consultant about import/integration approaches to optimize how you are maintaining the data integration.

-- Chuck Tomasi

You're all allways great, thanks !

-- Steff RD

Glad you appreciate it. Thank you for the kind words'

-- Chuck Tomasi

is this webinar recorded?

-- Abdulla Nedal Al-Nabulsi

Yes. We'll have it edited and posted to the community and YouTube in a couple days after the live breadcast.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is there any guidance or documentation on handling a simple flow with multiple sequential approvals? The use of the approval field seems to behave differently from workflow, setting the approval from Requested > Approved > Requested > Approved > ... with each approval.

-- Robert Elliott

I'm not sure I quite understand your use case. This might require a deeper discussion with your solution consultant. You might also want to post this question in the community to get some crowd sourcing ideas.

-- Chuck Tomasi

2. I had issues using XML parser. You'd use a sample xml to define how the xml payload should be expected. However, when a different xml came through or an error happened from a target server, the xml parser simply broke and there was no way to catch the exception?

-- Faizan Jalal

The XML parser, like any parser is expecting consistent input. If the input varies, the parser will have issues. As for catching exceptions, I'm not aware of anything at the moment, but I'm also not an XML Parser expert. You might want to post your question in the community and crowd source an answer or if the conclusion is that there is no such feature, consider adding it to the Idea Portal in the community. That's where our product managers look for many of their new feature ideas.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is there any way to create a variable and update it through subsequent steps, e.g. a counter that can be updated. Variable that can be shared between steps?

-- Faizan Jalal

Not at the moment, but I believe it's on the radar. We've heard this request from other customers as well.

-- Michael Slabodnick

i'm using NY flow designer and i had issues implementing the scenarios that i just brought up

-- Faizan Jalal

You may want to get an Orlando Personal developer instance from developer.servicenow.com and experiment a bit.

-- Chuck Tomasi

Is there a way to use server side code within the inline code of Flow designer? Many times I'm not able to do things quickly or be able to call a script include?

-- Faizan Jalal

Yes, you can. The inline code is run server side, so if you have script includes you want to use, go ahead. Keep in mind that you may have to qualify them (e.g. global.MyScriptInclude())

-- Chuck Tomasi

Not as much a question as an observation that with the current situation in the world being what it is, mixing examples of food ordering and COVID-19 related stuff in the same flow/webinar is kind of jarring.

-- Joseph Childers

Good point. Thanks for the note. I'll pass it on to Michael for future presentations.

-- Chuck Tomasi

what's the easiest, most sure-fire way to move a flow from sub-prod to prod? we've had trouble with flows breaking when doing that in the past via update sets (pre-New York)

-- Sundeep Kainth

For global, update sets. For scoped, publish/install. Nothing special there. All actions, subflows, flows, data streams, etc. are captured in an update set. FWIW, anything pre-New York is no longer supported with our N-1 support in place. I strongly recommend you look at getting to Orlando, or upgrading to Paris this fall. If the problem persists, work with customer support. Thanks.

-- Chuck Tomasi

I understand that integration hub with a flow can alter add or remove data from another system by instance trigger but what if I want to do something in my instance triggered by another system

-- amine hattab

I was interrupted by my kids, can I rewatch this? Will the link be sent via email?

-- Cortney Cable

Hi Cortney, This has been posted to the community and YouTube. I send an email to each person who asked questions once the post is made so if you follow the link in your email, you'll be brought to your question. The video is at the top of this list. 🙂 (I'm using ServiceNow to manage this whole webinar process now.)

-- Chuck Tomasi

I've had a few instances in which the Flow Designer wouldn't function properly or would fail inconsistently. What are some good tips to look out for to make sure it functions as expected?

-- Glenn Gerry

The execution details are your best tool for debugging flows and integrations. Beyond that, the system logs can also be helpful. There are some Flow system properties you can adjust to increase the verbosity - just be careful not to adjust these in production as it can "clog the log". :)

-- Chuck Tomasi

Great webinar. Thanks guys

-- Imran Khan

Glad you enjoyed it. Thank you for attending Imran.

-- Chuck Tomasi

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