3 Minute Video Demonstrating Managed File Transfer in Flux
I’ve produced a 3 minute video showing off some of the highlights of using Flux for Managed File Transfer. In Flux, MFT is easy to set up, run, and integrate with your other processes (especially with the great new Operations Console!)
Take a look at the link below and let us know what you think!
http://fluxcorp.com/latest/#flux-mft-video
Cool New Variable Substitution Features in Flux 7.11!
Yesterday, we released the latest version of Flux, 7.11. One of my favorite new features is the expansion of our variable substitution feature to include accessing fields, calling methods, and a few more neat tricks.
In Flux 7.10 (and previous versions), to use variable substitution, you were limited to simple data types (String, int, long, etc.) that had to be available already in one of the supported variable managers. This worked great for passing basic data between triggers and actions, but when things got more complex, it usually required adding a runtime data map or a prescript / postscript, which could quickly become difficult to manage.
For example, if you had a File Exist Trigger and just wanted to know how many files it found, you would first need to add a prescript to pull the number of files out of its result and store that in a new variable:
flowContext.put("numberOfResults", flowContext.get("RESULT").filename_matches.size());
Which you could then access directly using variable substitution:
${numberOfResults}
This came with some problems, though – specifically, since the variable had to be generated in one place and accessed in another, it was difficult to see who was generating that value, and where. Unless you had designed the flow chart initially and knew where that prescript was located, it could be a bit difficult to maintain or update the flow chart in the future.
One of the cool new features in Flux 7.11, then, is to “cut out the middleman” by making method calls and fields available directly within the substitution syntax itself. This means that instead of using a prescript, you could just directly access that information in the substitution itself:
${RESULT.filename_matches.size()}
Not only does this mean you can avoid using an extra prescript, but you can also see directly in the substituted field exactly where that value is coming from.
To cut back even further on the number of prescripts and postscripts you might need to use, the new variable substitution adds support for some new concepts like IF statements:
<#if MY_VARIABLE == 1> Test was true! </#if>
For loops:
<#list MY_COLLECTION as THIS_ITEM>
<#if THIS_ITEM % 2 == 0>%{THIS_ITEM}</#if>
</#list>
And some built-in String and numeric functions, including support for numeric operators, substrings, date and time functions, String length substitution, and even built-in HTML, XML, and XHTML encoding:
${MY_STRING?xml}
These are just some of the great new features that Flux 7.11 brings. Head to our website to see a complete list of features, find 7.11 downloads, and more!
Managing Your Support Tickets on the Flux Portal
In recent posts, I’ve talked about some of the changes we’ve made (and are continuing to make) to the Flux Portal, to provide a strong, integrated experience for our users. Today I’ll be taking a look at another one of those changes: the ability to view and manage support tickets, bug reports and feature requests directly from your browser.
To get started, first head to portal.fluxcorp.com/jira. As the URL indicates, we at Flux use Atlassian JIRA for support ticket tracking, as well as bug reports and new feature requests. You can also access JIRA after logging in to the main Portal dashboard (portal.fluxcorp.com) and selecting the “Support Dashboard” option on that page.
When you first visit the support dashboard, you’ll be prompted for a username and password. Just enter your Flux Portal credentials here to log in.
Logging In
If you don’t have a Flux Portal account, you can still access the Support Dashboard! The first time you send a mail to support@fluxcorp.com (which will open a support ticket), or someone else CC’s you on a ticket, you’ll receive a message back from the system with a new username and password you can use to access the Portal.
After you’ve logged in, you’ll find a box on the right-hand side of the page labelled “Saved Filters”. These filters allow you to browse the different items available, sorted by category.
Saved Filters
The items you can expect to find in each category are as follows:
- Bugs: Outstanding problems in the Flux software that have been reported to the development team and are awaiting a fix.
- New Features: Upcoming features and improvements to the Flux software that have been scheduled for implementation, either in a specific release or in the long-term Flux Road Map.
- Your Closed Support Tickets: Tickets that your or a Flux support engineer have marked as resolved. If you are looking for a reminder of the resolution of a previous item or a tidbit of information you’d previously received from the support team, you can find it here.
- Your Open Support Tickets: Ongoing support tickets. You can use this filter to view your active tickets and comment on them, mark them as resolved, or provide additional information.
To manage your active tickets, select the “Your Open Support Tickets” option from this list.
Once the filter is selected, you’ll see a view of all of your open tickets, along with a status and some additional information about the ticket. You can quickly see when the last update on the ticket was issued, whether the ticket is waiting for you or for a Flux support engineer, and more. To open a particular ticket, just click its entry in the “Key” column of this table:
Select the Key of the Ticket you want to View
A new view will appear showing the entire history of the ticket (including your replies and replies from the Flux support team) and a list of operations you can perform on the ticket.
Viewing a Ticket
You’ll notice a few options for the ticket in the column on the left-hand side of the page:
- Flip to Flux or Flip to Customer: If a ticket is waiting for your reply but you need some additional information from Flux, you can click “Flip to Flux” (or, if a ticket is waiting for Flux but you want to gather additional information before continuing, click “Flip to Customer”). If a ticket is waiting for your reply and you add a comment, the “Flip to Flux” option will be automatically invoked as well.
- Resolve Ticket: If you feel that no further action is needed on this ticket, you can resolve it using this option. Once you have resolved a support ticket, the Flux support team will review the ticket to determine whether any Flux improvements or documentation updates are appropriate, then close the ticket for you.
- Bump Ticket: This option is primarily used internally within JIRA (although you can select it, it will not have noticeable effect on the ticket except to increase its “Updated” date).
- Attach file: Allows you to attach a file to the ticket – this is useful for sharing logs, configuration files and other items with the support team. Any items you attach on an email to support@fluxcorp.com will also automatically be attached to the ticket.
- Attach screenshot: Allows you to attach a screenshot to the ticket (similar to “Attach file” above).
- Clone: Create a new support ticket, but copy all of the setting and the initial “Description” for this ticket.
- Comment: Add a new comment on the ticket. Commenting on a ticket is equivalent to sending an email for the ticket, and the Flux support team will automatically receive a copy of each comment you add through this interface.
- sub-task: If you need to open a new ticket but it is related to a subset of this ticket, you can add the ticket as a sub-task (this will allow the tickets to be linked through the JIRA interface).
- Email: Send a copy of this ticket as an email to an external address.
It’s that simple to view and manage your tickets! As you can see, the Support Dashboard is a great way to keep track of your past and present communications with the Flux support team.
You can use the same interface to view and comment on bugs and feature requests as well. In my next post, we’ll explore how you can use JIRA to communicate with the Flux development team about which bug fixes and improvements are most important to you.
Making a Custom Manual from the Flux Portal
In older versions of Flux, all of the documentation was shipped in PDF files in the Flux installation package. These files came with several limitations: they inflated the size of the installer, they could be difficult to navigate, and, of course, they were impossible to update with new information without requiring a fresh installation in a maintenance release of Flux.
As I’ve written about before, to work around these limitations we’ve adopted a new “wiki-style” approach to our documentation. This new online documentation is constantly updated to adapt to feedback we receive from our users. Of course, this comes with a drawback of its own – because it’s only available online, it is less portable than the PDF documentation, and more difficult to store locally.
Fortunately, the new Flux Portal provides a solution to these problems. In the new Portal, you can easily generate and download your own, custom PDF documentation for Flux. Not only does this allow you to easily save the documentation and allow for portable viewing, but it grants another great benefit: you can easily tailor the documentation to your own requirements, saving only the parts of the manual or other documentation that you are actually interested in reading.
There are two ways to create your own documentation: you can either generate a complete PDF of the entire documentation set, or you can create a PDF file for a single page of the documentation (for example, to download a PDF of a chapter in the manual, or of a specific example).
To generate a PDF of the complete documentation (or some large subset), follow these steps:
- Log in to the Flux Portal at portal.fluxcorp.com (if you do not have a Flux Portal account already, contact support@fluxcorp.com and we will happily assist you in creating one). Click the space link for the documentation you are interested in downloading (like Flux 7.10).
Select a Documentation Space
- Hover your cursor over the “Browse” menu in the upper right-hand corner of the page, and select “Advanced” from the menu that appears.
Select "Browse" -> "Advanced"
- In the menu on the left-hand side of the page that appears, select “PDF Export”.
Select "PDF Export" from the Menu
- Select the pages you want to be included in the final PDF file. For example, if you are interested in all of the documentation except the home page, release notes, and downloads, your selection might look something like:
Check the Pages you are Interested In
- Finally, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Export”. You’ll be directed to a new page that will display a progress meter showing the status of the PDF generation and estimated time remaining. Once the progress bar is full, you will be presented with a link to download the PDF file for the documentation you’ve generated.
As you can see, this provides a very flexible way to generate only the documentation you want to see.
If you’re only interested in a single page (rather than the complete documentation), follow these steps to get a PDF file for that page:
- Follow step 1 above to log in to the Flux Portal and find the documentation for your Flux version.
- Find the page you want to download as a PDF. For example, In the screen shot below, I’ve selected the Flux installation guide:
Select the Page you want to Download
- Hover your cursor over the “Tools” icon and select “Export to PDF” from the menu that appears.
Select "Tools" -> "Export to PDF"
Once you’ve selected “Export to PDF”, your browser will prompt you to save or open the newly generated file.
Because the documentation in the Flux Portal is frequently updated, be sure to check back regularly to guarantee that your PDF copies of the documentation have the most up-to-date information available!
New Flux Portal at portal.fluxcorp.com
As a few of you have heard already, we’ve been working hard recently to set up a new Portal system. We’ve heard the troubles you had with the previous Portal – from slow performance to confusing interfaces – and we’ve taken that all into account in selecting and designing the new system.
One of the exciting features of the new Portal is the ability to easily see the contact, company, and licensing information that we have on file for your account.
Viewing Your Flux Licenses
This new page will let you quickly and easily see exactly what information Flux has in its records for your license key, so we can be sure that our records are in sync with your own.
Downloads for the Flux 7.10 beta and the latest Flux maintenance release (7.9.14) are also now available from the new Portal. In the coming days, we’ll be working on bringing over the rest of the downloads, Javadoc, documentation, and other items from the old Portal.
To see the new Portal in action, just point your browser to:
We’re excited about the new site and we hope you will be too! Let us know what you think.
Flow Chart Dependencies with Flux 7.10
The newest version of Flux, Flux 7.10, is now available in beta from our website. Some of the other Fluxies have already blogged about the exciting new features that Flux 7.10 offers, including the completely revamped user interface in the Operations Console and greatly improved performance in the engine itself. I’d like to talk about another one of the great improvements that Flux 7.10 provides: flow chart dependencies, using the redesigned Flow Chart Action and the new Flow Chart Trigger.
The Flow Chart Action, originally introduced in Flux 7.9, lets you add a new flow chart to the engine from within the context of another flow chart (passing along key contextual data from the “parent” flow). Flux 7.10 adds two new features to this action to provide greater control in the workflow: a synchronous option (allowing the parent flow to wait for the newly created flow chart to finish before it moves on) and the ability to overwrite existing flow charts on the engine.
Flow Chart Action Properties
In Flux 7.9, waiting for the flow chart to complete required the use of customized code, or using a Sub Flow Chart Action. The Sub Flow Chart Action had many downsides (sub flow chart data was stored within the parent flow, adding complexity, and sub flow charts could not be operated on independently of their parent flows) that the Flow Chart Action avoids, and the new synchronous option means the Flow Chart Action now enjoys all of the benefits of the Sub Flow Chart Action with none of the downsides that made that action difficult to use.
Along similar lines, the new Flow Chart Trigger is a trigger that waits for a flow chart (or several flow charts under a given namespace) to complete before moving on in the flow.
Flow Chart Trigger
The same thing could be accomplished previously in older versions of Flux, but often required a complex array of Message Triggers, Checkpoints, Final Checkpoints, or Audit Trail Triggers. Again, this could be confusing to a user who is trying to monitor what a flow is waiting for or when it will continue on. The Flow Chart Trigger removes that complexity and makes the monitoring and editing experience much easier for a Flux operator.
These are just a couple of the many changes included in Flux 7.10 to make the user experience stronger than ever before. If you’d like to try these new features yourself, head to our website and download the latest beta release there. Let us know what you think!
Process Action Error Condition in Flux 7.10
Error handling has long been one of the strongest aspects of Flux. If an error occurs while executing an action or trigger, Flux can seamlessly invoke its error handling mechanisms, which are fully customizable and allow you to respond to errors exactly as your requirements dictate.
The Process Action, however, has always been notoriously difficult to integrate with the error handler. Because the error handler is only invoked when a Java Exception occurs, the Process Action can cause confusing behavior; for example, a non-zero exit code often means that the process failed, but this will not cause a Java Exception so Flux “thinks” that the process completed successfully.
Compounding the problem, different exit codes mean different things for different processes, and even different users of the same process might not view the same exit code as an error. In the past, this has led to a confusing network of conditional flows and Error Actions coming from each Process Action, to force Flux to invoke the error handler for various exit codes.
Error Handling before Flux 7.10
The upcoming Flux 7.10 corrects this, allowing you to specify exactly what exit code should indicate an error has occurred – simplifying your flow chart and allowing your Process Actions to follow the same error handling behavior as the rest of your actions.
The error condition uses a simplified version of the conditional flow syntax. In the error condition, the special keyword “result” is substituted at runtime with the value of the exit code from the process that your Process Action runs. You can set this condition to compare the exit code to any numerical value; if the condition evaluates to true, then Flux will invoke the error handler exactly as it would for any other action that encountered an error.
The Error Condition
This is just one of the many new features coming in Flux 7.10 to help make Flux more streamlined and easier for you to use!
A complete list of the new features coming in Flux 7.10 is available online now.
For more information on how the error condition will work, see the Flux wiki documentation for the Process Action.
Big Documentation Changes Afoot at Flux!
One of the things we’re praised for at Flux is our fast, knowledgeable support team. When our users have a question, they know they can count on a member of our team to reply quickly and accurately, and work with them to see even the toughest problems through to the end.
On the other hand, one area where our users have had trouble in the past is with our documentation. Flux is sometimes a complicated tool, and (especially for new users) we know that it can be difficult to quickly find and apply information for the task at hand.
We’re determined to improve that. To start, we have introduced the new Flux wiki (powered by Confluence), a constantly-updated resource for the latest Flux documentation. We are using the new wiki as an opportunity to improve the documentation experience for all of our users.
Flux Documentation on the new Confluence Wiki
As part of this update, we’re applying the same lessons and techniques we’ve used to make our support team so successful. Every support ticket is treated not just as a question about Flux, but as an opportunity to improve the documentation and the software itself. Before closing a support ticket, our support team will scrutinize it for any areas where new or updated documentation could have alleviated the ticket, or even prevented it from occurring altogether.
Long-time Flux users may also have noticed another change in the way support tickets are handled – when replying to a ticket, if we do find that the same information would be useful for other users, we will include it in the documentation instead. On the ticket, we’ll supply a link to the updated documentation (giving you, and all of our users, a permanent and constantly maintain location for the information you need).
We’re also making an effort to provide more, and better, documentation targeted toward the end-user experience (rather than exclusively showing Flux from a developer’s perspective). Where possible, we will try to present Flux techniques and ideas from a viewpoint that makes sense to end users and developers alike – and where Java code is required, it will be clearly noted in the documentation (or moved to the section “Embedding Flux in Java Applications”, which will contain the majority of our developer-centric documentation).
Ultimately, we hope that these new techniques will offer users the same experience in the documentation that they have come to know and enjoy from our support team. We are looking forwarding to applying your feedback to make the Flux experience better than ever!
