[Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] scare hey good afternoon good evening and good night everybody Welcome to Creator toolbox today the show that is brought to you by the servicenow developer program where we demo brand new features that are new to our newest release and kind of dive into the facets that help specifically developer community so thank you for joining us here today um currently as you can tell by that upper corner we are in the middle of our Utah release thank you for help uh and there's actually quite a substantial amount of content that we've already put out over the last couple of weeks so if you'd like to catch up on what has been previous released as well as was still yet to come you can check that out at devlink.sn Utah but before we dive into all that fantastic content uh let's do some introductions because you might be looking at the screen going I don't see that many familiar faces on here today um I'll kick things off my name is Laura McManaman I am one of the senior developer Advocates that is with uh pranav and Earl and Chuck I joined I think it was either July or August of last year having prior been a Creator workflow solution consultant and developer and I'll kick things off too pronov hi everyone my name is pranav and I am a senior developer advocate here at servicenow quite new to team icons I'm very new it's like already been four months so I could say I'm like the old guy now but and before before joining service now I was working with a customer and was helping them with the implementation and yeah that's about me awesome well we're so so happy to be here today uh this is actually a pretty important live stream if you're joining us here live because this is pranav and I's first live stream uh without Chuck and Earl so it's going to be a real um and that might have some scuffed moments so we apologize in advance um but luckily we're talking about something pretty familiar to most people today which is flow designer so flow designer whoa oh you want me to share your not yet not not yet um so full designer as you may or may not know is the primary aspect for showcasing automation on the servicenow platform so uh anytime that you were automating a process or perhaps an integration that is the place that you are doing it um it came out I want to say Jakarta is that what version it came out from yeah I have that right yes I think yes awesome I I usually get those wrong but um so it's been out for quite a while so uh but every single release there's always a significant amount of improvements that are made so I like to call it the uh the flow designer speed round because there's always something to look forward to so uh with that being said now I will shift over to my other screen so that we can chit chat about what is going on here today so the first thing that we are going to be diving into uh is the fact that I am doing this in a PDI I always like to do as much as I can from a PDI because that's something that you can take advantage of as well so just a nice reminder that Utah pdis are currently available um if you'd like to dive into those to experiment with any of the features that we are exploring here today so uh the first place that we are going to be diving into actually isn't in flow designer actually we are going to be talking about a concept that is new to Utah 4 flows which is the concept of flow priorities so a lot of things have some sort of indication of priority on the servicenow platform that could be business rules that could be UI policies a whole array of things indicate that there's an order of operations that you have control over in flow designer that wasn't the case it was first in first out and even if something was taking a million years to run right like some big data import that's maybe not that business imperative for that moment of time would just kind of clog the drain so luckily in Utah we have applied something that people take advantage of the concept of order of operations and apply this to flows I will say uh is currently not accessible through flow designer itself which is why I'm using the standard view uh the admin view of servicenow so if you'd like to customize a flow priority what you're going to do is you're going to search for process automation within your application navigator and you're going to go to the section that says flow Administration and settings now I will say that by default even on Utah flow priority is not visible so that's one thing to remember if you're you know if you're following along with me today you've opened up settings and you're thinking I don't see flow priority anywhere that is because you must personalize your list or configure your list to Showcase this so it'll be indicated by this flow priority setting that you have in either the available or selected fields now if we open up any one of these entities you'll see [Music] eventually oh I beg your pardon um my apologies for the flow priority you have a couple of options uh the first of which is medium you will see that everything currently defaults to medium and that is true for anything that you have also previously built so something is a medium priority uh that is the standard order of operations but there are two additional options there is low priority which you can set for the non you know super business imperative things that might take a tremendous amount of time think of like data Imports and things like that that are probably running at the middle of the night and also high priority items so high priority items obviously take Prestons over both medium and low and are should be rarely used right something that needs to be executed absolutely immediately um something that like calls to mind are the flows that I built for like emergency notifications and things things like that things that would necessitate urgency to be completed um they uh so the way these things work is that they do not pause mid action they will pause in between actions so that is something to keep in mind when architecting your flows so if you have a step like an action step or a loop that takes a tremendous amount of time uh that won't save like flow priority won't save you it does it in between the actions it cannot stop something mid action so that is flow priority anything to add to that pranav or anything that you're seeing comments because I cannot see the comments currently I think everyone is loving this flow priority thing because I think this was missing for some time so woohoo I love that uh two flow designer so now that we kind of cleared that Loop we could actually get into a flow designer itself so uh I want to First address the action designers in the room because they do not get enough attention and enough love um if you're new to flows um essentially what necessitates a flow is a trigger that turns it on and then a series of actions and logic that dictate which actions are triggered so think of actions as the automated function so that is approving something uh changing a field sending an email doing something with integration Etc and so there's tons that come out of box but also a lot of pro coders spend you know a lot of time building custom action so not only can you build flows and flow designer but you can build actions I'm putting them at the top of my list that everyone is here can talk about the fact that you now see the impact of your work so one thing that was missing with actions is people would spend you know their whole career architecting these very complicated actions with scripts and you know calls and all these types of things and the business would ask them you know like how is the impact of this action like how many people are using it and there wasn't a good place to Showcase that so now with your actions you can see related flows so even if there are security constraints this probably wasn't the best one to click on considering it's not being used so let me try let me try again as far as that goes uh let's open up just add a pause I think that's the one I looked at earlier and we see related flows you'll showcase not only all of the flows that currently use your action but also whether or not they're active so you can see like oh I built this thing maybe a year ago and I can see that it's being used by 30 flows across the platform even the ones I don't have security access to so keep in mind even if your slas and your security permissions do not allow you to see a lot of extra things um they will still be counted for you so you can still see uh the overall number of flows uh not only that but if you know it wouldn't be that useful as just a list these are all clickable entities as well so if you want to actually dive in and see what was being used in this case it's a subflow even better to illustrate my point it also showcases subflows as well in this list so you can dive straight into how your action is being used see the context of that use and then go back to maybe make any types of priority changes Etc and this is really nice because it helps you um better determine what should be prioritized I see that with a lot of changes in uh Utah right that's the whole um the app management dashboard kind of helps you as a developer better Orient what you should be working on by how people are using it I think that kind of plays into that that theme as well anything else purnov that I've missed with the old action designer or what what do you think of this overall new feature so I to be honest I haven't tried this thing but the way you're showing this thing the related flows definitely when I was a developer in the past right it would definitely would have helped me out a lot right because we we wanted to find certain relations and other things so yeah really cool feature nice sweet man I'm just I'm glad everyone's taking it's all slow designer stuff um also this I will say I'm I am like the flow designer champion of the world I heard a statistic of how how much of our community still relies on workflow editor which is great it's a great feature um however I am I am the champion for flow designer so anything that gets the chat riled up about why they like it I'm like yes take it and run with it please alrighty so the next part is actually diving into flows himself so I'm actually going to bounce out of here and I'm going to go into my app engine studio just because I had something I was I was poking around with so now that we're actually going to dive uh straight into flow designer itself there are a couple of interesting changes so if we create a new flow this none of this matters it's just how how I'm creating the blank slate we'll just call this Blank Slate for instance uh there are a couple of interesting changes that bring this closer to gender or gender parity to feature parity uh with other aspects within flow designer So speaking directly to the work this uh workflow editor Pro community that really really loves the designer view this currently is not at complete feature parity with the standard um flow designer View Utah makes a big step forward in that regard because the entity them that represents stages is now editable and represented in your diagramming view so for example if I create a very simple flow that maybe I don't know sends an email to to Jeff at notreal.com and says hello and we add that to a specific stage here so we say this is the intro stage the value of zero we flip over to our diagramming View I was about to say maybe it doesn't but it loaded in just a second um it not only represents those stages but also they are editable here as well so that was the the we're tiptoeing closer to the line where the diagramming view is at complete feature parity with the um regular regular flow designer View and I I need to I can add one thing like if this feature doesn't excite you to move from workflow to flow I don't think there is anything else so you should you should definitely think of moving from workflow to flow after this oh don't give me so I can go that's okay switch their own um so uh this kind of brings us to the the finale of our list of photo designer enhancements which is something that I find many people will get tremendous value out of so I don't know how y'all build workflows but I build them as such I'm thinking about the use case right I'm thinking about the thing that needs to be automated and I kind of build it as I go right I might have some notes but I might be kind of it's a bit like jazz right you're kind of it's a bit like free-form jazz so I might send an email and think oh May that's that's probably best to uh we'll probably look we need to look up some records after sending that email and oh yeah after it's looking up those specific records it's probably great to iterate through those or maybe do some sort of logic and it's kind of like a bouncing around of ideas until I find something I like once everything's done right once everything works and it feels good and I'm about to push something to completion I think to myself man that thing is very similar to something I built two months ago you know or a part of this flow is very similar or um just the same as something that I built a while ago that probably should have been a subflow everyone has gotten to this point right it's similar with just general development of kind of oh that should have been a callable entity right versus something that's just hard-coded and Abandoned and having to edit it all over the platform same applies here right using a subflow not only um makes your workflows run better because it better compartmentalizes all the entities um but if things needed in the future right you just change it in one place you don't have to change it all over the entire platform save this for subflows but and I'll I'll admit to this first when I'm right there at the Finish Line sometimes I get a little lazy don't necessarily want to go back and change everything so you move on you take your W and you move on to the next project however that's not the best right that's not the best practice so we are trying to enable things in a best practice manner that make it very easy for you to do I think that this is a tremendous Leap Forward in that we can now select multiple successive actions and turn them into a subflow with the click of a button so if you see now next to this uh action I'll zoom in a bit um action header I guess there is now a thing that says select multiple I believe that was there before but now if you select multiple you will see that there is it's a little screwed up with my zoom unfortunately but there's now a little operations tab here that says convert to subflow I will add an asterisk right this is not entirely perfect there are a couple of action types that are not permissible in this type of conversion however a good lot of them are right so if I click this button I name this like my test blank slate um subflow it will bring in any inputs that are needed as well in this case I didn't utilize any and click convert to subflow it will build me my sunflower so in lieu of uh doing all of that by hand and going back and changing everything um with a click of a button it creates exactly what I need so uh print off how helpful would this have been for you a year or two ago oh yeah like uh I I can share a story like I remember like I was working with couple of developers in the past like when I was doing consulting so I remember like we have created a similar they have added actions and the same actions we're using in different kind of a flows that was there if this feature was there we would have removed that kind of a thing and created a soft flow there itself because it was like we were becoming lazy because we have already copied a couple of actions already in different floors if this feature was there it would have been super easy so I think I love this thing personally this is my favorite yeah this is for this is my favorite too although I will say that the associated flows is a close second just because I I like stuff that shows like objective impact on like on your work and that's a nice little like cheat code to know the impact of the actions that you're making so that's a that's definitely a very very close second um there'll also be I've also seen the uh Bank of content put out for knowledge and there's a lot of stuff concerning this specific feature so keep your eye out for it when you are building your knowledge uh agendas as well I will say uh that like I said it truly is a bit of a speed round with regards to uh flow designer there's not a tremendous amount of enhancements um but I think they're pretty impactful ones so in summary we have the entities that can now be controlled by flow priority so now by default all of your legacy uh all of your legacy flows have been set to a medium priority you can go back and change those to either low and or high uh in addition to this you have the ability to see the impact of what you've been working on through Associated Flows In Your Action designer so now you can see exactly where those actions are being used and click directly into them and jump into them uh so there's support for stages now within the diagramming view of your photo designer so anything that you do with stages in the flow area will also be done in the diagramming area and you can select multiple successive actions and turn them into a subflow with the click of a button this is kind of similar um it is not necessarily flow designer but it's usually lumped in with flow designer we actually did an entire uh live coding happy hour on this but process automation designer also received a pretty big change as well I'm not really set up to show switch on this one uh I'm not sure if not I can just unfortunately I don't have it on this instance but um on process automation designer you now have optional activities as well so if you want a nice little bonus for joining this pretty short and sweet live stream today process automation designer now allows you to do both Global and Lane oriented optional activities that way as your various Excuse me while as your various people are answering questions and doing a lot of helpful work if they need to go above and beyond and include something that might be a bit of an outlier that doesn't have to either go completely undocumented or you don't have to like hard code that in necessarily later it's just as it's the same as building everything else are there any uh questions in popping up pranav I can't see the window so I apologize yes I think there was a one there was one question about flow priority so there he's asking like when should I consider changing the flow priority from default value um I would say that the best answer that I can provide is that probably most things should stay medium for now right I think that what should be downgraded to something that's a low priority would be like a very comprehensively long data import stuff that you're usually doing in the middle of the night probably anyway um I would set those to low priority um and conversely very high impact flows that maybe affect um like like personal well-being of employees or things like that I would definitely promote to High um I would think it's probably more important to promote certain things to high than to downgrade things to low because usually the timing of them would also just make them a low priority anyway versus high which could happen at possibly any time um yeah like the the most like if I'm looking back at what I've built in the past the number one thing I would definitely promote to high was a flow that was like for a machine flag Machine Factory floor emergencies so if someone had gotten hurt or a there was a substantial business consequence to things being derailed or unfortunately possibly both then that would definitely be a high priority flow that would need to go regardless of what was going on um so stuff like that I would definitely promote versus decide what should be I would have to probably rely on maybe like just just to see how long things take and I will say like inflow designer you can see all the metadata on how long steps take and how long Flows In general take so if you're seeing something especially on like an app management dashboard that is just taking a doozy of a time I would maybe nuke that one to uh to a lower priority item for sure card I think that was a perfect answer and I'm seeing one more question like does does subflow have Associated flow like action have Associated flow uh yes or I'm sorry the subflow have a so okay I understand the question um to be honest with you I do not know but let's dive in and find out I'm not quite sure I don't know it wasn't noted as something that was added in the workflow in the uh release notes but that doesn't mean I can't check so so um if it was added it would probably be here um but that doesn't mean that's something that you couldn't report on um I do I do not believe that currently it is a default that is added however you can report on that from what I understand but no not not currently like they have for actions maybe winky winky face maybe someday which means it probably is in the uh which means it's probably in the back line yes Safe Harbor yeah Safe Harbor Safe Harbor I can't say that too much anymore because we're past general release at this point point that was like my one safety net before but now it's it's out in full force which is really exciting any other questions no I think there are no other questions and but one thing is that everyone is loving the convert actions to flow convert action things that is there so quite exciting a lot of people are showing and I hope they will be using it soon and if I was a developer at this point I would definitely be using this thing absolutely absolutely I like I said I I when they released it I was like I was like that would have been so helpful to me selfishly like a lot of years ago I would have loved having that it would have made it enables you to do to abide by Best Practices better which is something that I am always a fan of like if it's harder to do the best practice people aren't going to do it right that's why again I'll get off my soapbox about why I love flow designer so much here in a second but that's why having like the natural language aspect of flow designer is so helpful because you don't necessarily always have to add notes I'm I love developers I am a developer I would never annotate stuff as well as I probably should have so having something that does that for you or does a good chunk of that for you I eat that stuff up I love it I love it and I think I think these are some of the quality updates in Utah and flow I know they are they're quite few but these are some quality updates yeah and and I think Lauren if there is nothing else probably we can wrap up yeah it says uh is is pretty it's just like swollen have lots of great content at this point we don't have that too many uh of the Utah release which is crazy to think about um but not only that but uh knowledge is rapidly approaching much to everyone on the planning's uh part Chagrin um it is I believe 46 days away which is terrifying um and really exciting but terrifying as well um so make sure that you keep an eye on the content that is coming out for knowledge I will say that the uh agenda Builder is not up yet however the content like uh catalog is so make notes of things that look interesting to you I will also give you a nice knowledge cheat code people will reserve a spot in a class and not show up so if a class you know let's say you write these things down you really want to go you go to book them and it's already filled up still write it down somewhere or add like a Google Calendar entity there because tons there's lots of people that don't show it is Vegas so uh that's one like little cheat I will offer to you about knowledge today yep yep I think that's a great cheat like go make sure you have your added to your calendar if you want to visit a particular session yeah lots of stuff to look forward to can't wait to talk more about it freely so that we don't get in trouble safe upper yeah well awesome thank you all so much for joining us for this little bite size Creator toolbox this morning um if you have any questions as well feel free to leave them in the comments down below as well once this is posted we'll try and get to those as well um thank you so much for joining here today and we will catch you on the flip side talk to y'all soon thank you folks bye bye bye thank you [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]