hey everyone welcome back to another go with the flow as always i'm robert fedorick and it is so good to have you here in my last episode which should be appearing right up here we created a custom flow action but i've already got questions about all the different types of inputs and outputs that we saw from within the flow action so this is just a short video to visualize the inputs and outputs that happen within a flow action and hopefully make that easier to understand so the first thing we're going to do is explore why this is confusing in the first place and i gotta admit it confused me quite a bit too when i first started so what we have here is the flow action interface and the very first thing you do is define inputs for the flow then as you add steps to the flow action you see that the steps themselves have an input and then when you're done defining what the step does the step also has an output that you define and then finally at the end of your flow action you are expecting that this passes something back to the flow that invokes it so the flow action itself has a set of outputs how are we supposed to make sense of all these different sources and locations of inputs and outputs here's an image that i created to make some sense out of so we think of the big blue box as the flow action itself and you'll notice that on the right hand side we have these colored lines those are the inputs that we expect to come to us from the flow that is launching this action so it makes sense to define the action inputs now what helps is that inside this flow there are one or more steps and these steps can use those inputs in multiple ways but you have to define those inputs in the steps so you'll see that step one only utilizes two of the action inputs so that step only needs to have two inputs defined and then we define those inputs as being sourced by the action inputs you'll also see that step one outputs a purple line and that's just to showcase that step two can use both an input coming from the action input but also an input that's coming from the output of another step you'll also see that both step one and step two send outputs intended to go directly outside of the flow action so those go to the action output section which either does further transformation on those outputs or just outputs those values directly i hope that makes things a lot cleaner and easier to understand if you want to check out the entire go with the flow playlist there's going to be a little notification popping up right here be sure to check that out and as always if you need an accomplished servicenow architect in consigliere in your corner or if you need uh staffing done in the servicenow or if you need to find that perfect servicenow resource or if you're a servicenow partner looking to refine their message in the servicenow space please reach out to me with the email you see here thanks for watching