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!
