Utility: Action

Maybe your eye already caught the new Utility "Action". That's what this article is about! It does make one of my previous articles obsolete, though always good when such functionality becomes out-of-the-box.

Note: The fields shown in the Flow Action Properties can differ a little bit depending on if you selected Action or Subflow.

Flow Designer Subflow or Action

The new Utility Action supports executing a Flow Designer Subflow or Action. It does not support executing a Flow Designer Flow (the custom Topic Block earlier mentioned, does support executing a Flow Designer Flow). Positives of having this new Utility are amongst others that you can simply select a Subflow or Action, and depending on those, Inputs become visible. This helps guide you through the usage of the Flow Designer Subflow or Action.

For this article, I've selected an Action that retrieves System Property values. The input is simply the System Property name, and the output the System Property value. After selecting the Action on the Utility Flow Action Properties, both the (mandatory) input and the output automatically become visible and can be used.

Note: The output only becomes visible when you select "Wait for response".

The output mapping can easily be used using the data pill or scripting vaInputs.variable_name.

Result

The result of my first small test using an Action to retrieve System Property Values instantly works. Just having dragged/dropped the Utility Action and a Bot Response Text, selected the Action and added the output to the Bot Response Text using the data pill.

The usage of this new Utility Action looks so easy and smooth!

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And that's it!

Kind regards,

Mar k Roethof

ServiceNow Technical Platform Architect @ Quint Technology

2x ServiceNow Developer MVP

2x ServiceNow Community MVP

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