Workflow Overview

A Workflow comprises an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activities. In Toca, the Workflow is the highest level of automation. It is the final stage where you put all your activities together to represent your business process. The workflow may be considered a view or representation of the real work.

Nodes

Nodes can be dragged onto your workflow canvas.

• Start - Denotes the start point of your workflow. Can only be used once.
• Exclusive - Defines a decision point in the workflow
• Trigger - Allows you to start another workflow
• Label - A simple text label with customisable font options.
• Stop - Denotes the point at which the automation should stop. A workflow can have multiple stop nodes.

Inputs, outputs and context (including AppUserId)

Inputs

By adding Inputs to an activity, you are telling the activity to expect to be started with some variables and these inputs can be injected into a Workflow when it starts, regardless of how the Workflow is triggered.

Outputs

To Output a value is to say that you want to use that value somewhere outside of that activity.

Workflow Context

These concepts are very important when working with workflows as they are one of the easiest ways to use contextual data across multiple activities. Simply output a Variable from one activity and then configure one or more activities further down the line to expect it as an input.

An example would be: If you were to create an App User in 'Activity A', using the 'create app user' action, you could then output the subsequent 'AppUserId'. Then, further along the workflow, you could tell 'Activity B' to expect 'AppUserId' as an input. 'Activity B' could then, for example, manage the permissions of that App User, or add them to a certain group based on other contextual data.

Flow Control

Making a Decision

Decision-making in a workflow involves using the Exclusive node. This node allows connections to multiple activities or nodes, each with its own condition. If a condition is met, the workflow follows that specific path.

The data which forms part of the exclusive expression will frequently be an output from an activity somewhere earlier in the workflow. Clicking the variable button and clicking on an activity will show all available outputs. This will include the 'activityFailed' output which has the type: boolean. An example of this being used in an exclusive may look like:

If activityfailedBoolean == true - then follow the path to the stop node

Or activityfailedBoolean == false - then continue to the next activity node.

When you have an exclusive node highlighted and have pressed the variable button, you can also click the tab on the left hand side labelled 'datastores' which will show you all datastores and their variables. You can use these datachips as part of expressions in the exact same way that you would an output from an activity.

Loops in Workflows

Exclusives aren't just for single decisions; they can create loops too. If, for example, you have a workflow that starts by creating a variable called "counter" and then increments it by 1 in the next activity. The goal is to loop until the counter reaches 10 and then end the workflow. To achieve this, we insert an Exclusive node after the step that adds 1 to the counter. This Exclusive node has two conditions:

If the counter equals 10, proceed to the stop node.

OR

If the counter is less than 10, loop back to the first activity adding 1 to the counter.

Assuming the counter starts at 0, this loop will execute 9 times until the counter reaches 10, ending the workflow. This loop pattern enables more concise activities by moving loops from activities to the workflow; facilitating orchestration directly from the Workflow.

Workflow Configuration

To edit a workflow's configuration, click on the cog icon in the top right of any workflow designer.

Reporting Levels

The reporting level of a workflow designates how much information is returned when it is run, this is the information that can be found on the reporting page. There are circumstances where you may want to decrease your reporting level due to large amounts of data which can build up unnecessarily.

To change the reporting level of a job, enter the workflow designer and access the workflow settings by pressing the cog icon. There are 4 reporting levels which are presented in descending order:

• Debug - This option will provide all data which is available as part of the report including all action data.
• Actions - Will return every action which was run as part of the job but none of its outputs.
• Nodes - Will only show the nodes of the workflow e.g start, activity, exclusive, finish.
• Errors - This, the lowest level of report, will only show the errors which have caused a job to fail.

On Fail/Error

These settings allow you to control what the Workflow should do if it fails.

Screenshot on Fail

Save a screenshot - this functionality is reserved for GUI bots and will take a screenshot of the bot screen if an error is encountered.

Send Email on Fail

Receive email notification - An email will be sent to the email address of the current user if an error is encountered.

Run Workflow

Run another Workflow immediately after this one if it fails, this will jump ahead of any other Workflows which are currently queued. This feature is designed to allow you to build recovery logic which can recover the situation if anything goes wrong in your original Workflow. This might include setting a desktop environment back to a clean slate if you are doing some GUI automation or it might include rolling back some data so a data upload process can start from scratch again.

Any Workflow that you choose to run if the current Workflow fails will have some default values injected such as the error message, the name of the Workflow and the Job ID in case you want to log this information. Additionally, you can use the Job ID in conjunction with the Re-Run Jobs action to rerun your failed job with the exact same outputs.

Activity Nodes

• Disable - This activity will become greyed out and will be passed over as 'disabled' when the workflow is run.
• Duplicate - This will create a duplicate node of the activity which is not linked to any other nodes.