Growing Automation Projects

When your automation project starts to grow, there are a usually a couple of things that you start to feel:

1. Individual activities and workflows can get too large
2. There is often reusable behaviour stuck inside larger activities or workflows

Luckily, there are several tools and features which help to deal with both of these things.

Exclusives in Workflows

Activities are not the only place in automation that you can add flow control logic, you can also add decision points and even implement loops within a Workflow. This means that if you are looping over a large list or table of data in your automation, you don't just have to put all of this logic inside a single looping action in an activity. You can extract this control flow to the workflow level, allowing you to break your activities up into smaller and more manageable pieces. This is why exclusive nodes in workflows are so powerful!

Decision Points

Exclusive nodes allow you to specify conditions on each branch that leaves the node so that you can specify under which scenario each branch should be executed. This is similar to the If Then action but the difference being that you can specify multiple different branches of execution with an exclusive.

The benefit of this is that it allows you to break up what might be a large activity with lots of If Then actions into lots of smaller activities where the conditional flow of execution is handled by the Workflow. Breaking up your activities into smaller units of automation can be beneficial as it gives you the option of reusing these smaller, less niche activities in other workflows.

To create a decision point in a workflow, drag an exclusive node onto the workflow and draw all the possible paths of execution that could follow on from the exclusive node. When you click on the exclusive node, you'll then see in the properties panel on the right hand side a list of text boxes which allow you to define the conditions that need to be met for each branch. Define your conditions by righting an evaluation statement such as: Left Hand Side (LHS) == Right Hand Side (RHS). You can also use the else keyword, which means if none of the other conditions are met then the workflow will travel down the branch with has else defined on it.

Looping

You can also use exclusive nodes to define loops in your workflow by drawing one of the paths from your exclusive to an activity that precedes the exclusive node. This allows you to repeat activities multiple times in a workflow until your loop is complete and you reach another condition. This saves you from having to have a single looping action in activity (such as For Each, For Each Row or For Each JSON Object) with many actions nested beneath it. Instead, you can divide the behaviour that should happen inside the loop into several smaller activities and then configure your workflow to do the loop.

To set up an exclusive in such a way that it should loop, you need to set up your exclsuive as you would normally but one of your paths should point to a node that precedes the exclsuive node and then you should have another path with a break condition on it, i.e. a condition that means the workflow will exit the loop. Think your conditions through and make sure that you haven't built a loop that will run forever!

Run Workflow

You may encounter scenarios when developing a new workflow where you need to reuse logic that you have already defined in a workflow. Instead of copying the old workflow, node for node, into your new workflow we can instead just run the old workflow from our new one. We can achieve this using the Run Workflow action, which allows you to run a workflow from an activity. You can think of this a bit like calling a function. The Run Workflow action allows you to select a Workflow to run, not just from the current automation project but any others that you have access to. Once the workflow is selected you are given the option to populate the inputs required by the workflow which you can do with static values or you can use datachips from your activity.

This pattern can be particularly useful when you have workflows which do things like update audit databases or BI data sources and you need to run these workflows whenever other workflows run.

Copy Activity to Project

When you develop an activity that is useful for more than one project, you can actually copy just that activity to different projects using the "Copy to Project" tool. Whilst you could use the Run Workflow functionality in this scenario, if it's only one or two activities you're interesting in, this can be a more practical way of sharing that automation functionality across