[Music] hello and welcome to tech now the web series for ServiceNow administrators developers of all skill levels on a wide variety of ServiceNow topics thank you for joining us it is my great pleasure to have with us a special guest today to talk about flow designer and integration hub and all of the stuff we've come out we haven't talked about this in about 18 months it's crazy and that's three releases so you can imagine how much stuff we've added to the platform and added to these features sins I think we talked about it in Kingston it was a while ago so there's Madrid and New York and Orlando and next month we'll talk a little bit about what's coming in Paris but we can't talk about that yet what we can talk about is what we've got today so let's get started if you haven't met me before my name is Chuck Tomasi I am from ServiceNow been here for 10 years was a customer for a couple before that and enjoying every minute of it as I think I have the world's greatest job so I get to learn and share information with you in venues like this and I am very very happy to be here and be able to do that next up is the one and only Craig step let me unmute myself and I will introduce myself then so I'm Craig step I'm the program manager actually I should change that I think I'm staff programmer now of cloud labs and I support all the infrastructure of where all the classes that we do with any of the training like acknowledge or any of the virtual classes you may be taking through ServiceNow and I've been doing that for quite a while now feels like 20 years but actually it's been more like four or five and I've been a service now since 2014 and been the co-host of tech now with Chuck and everybody since 2016 so here I am and I will toss it over to Michael hi good morning good afternoon my name is Michael slobotnik so I'm a platform architect at ServiceNow like Chuck I used to work for a customer I used to work for a partner as well doing implementations I'd be claim to fame was building a whole game system in service now back and before we even had Aspen so that's kind of fun as well and then I guess the best part is I got rejected from dental school multiple times so I just felt like the IT like everything else and that being said I'm excited to be here no Chuck for several years Craig maybe a few years whatever and I'm sure you'll hear a lot of dog banging as my kids do just came home are gonna be knocking on the door so they may be unknowing participants a family man good stuff all right real quick wanted to go over our agenda we are going to be talking about flow designer and integration hub as I mentioned for Madrid New York Orlando the features that have come out there Michael's going to be doing a demo and also we'll take your Q&A in that live panel if you're watching live if you're watching this afterwards put it in the comments on the community on YouTube and we'll respond as quickly as possible there so thank you very much again for joining us if we don't get to your questions please apologies there are typically lots of them on the live event what we will then do is take those all of them answered and unanswered and finish the job in the next day or so as we produce the video will answer the questions and those will be posted back to our community so I will have all of the questions and all of the answers sometimes we even to go deeper to the developers and product managers to get your answers you ask awesome questions and unlike the popular myth we don't know everything about everything so we have to check that the experts so want to also recommend the customer Success Center if you're not familiar with that a real quick plug go to service now.com slash success wherever you are on your customer journey this is a great resource pool for you to dig in dive deeper find out what it takes to do an upgrade or implement a CMDB all of that stuff to get the maximum value out of your investment in service now because after all that's what your boss wants you to do right we've paid money for this subscription and you're going to get the most out of it this is how you can do that whether it's you or process manager or the platform owner somebody should be going to the Success Center on a regular basis because there's always new content showing up there quick plug also for the developer portal developer dot service now.com free personal developer instance free learning plans all the API reference lots of great information over there including some blog articles about knowledge xx where Andrew and Brad and I we pulled together and curated some of the sessions and workshops that we pulled out so if you're looking for more information about flow designer there's about 10 breakout sessions and workshops that we've got direct links to that you can find and follow and do this stuff I myself did one just what was it last week weekend that's how I spend my weekend I went and learned about data streams there was a debugging session CCB 1427 I think it was and a workshop about building data streams CCW 1429 now I don't expect you to remember all these numbers but what you can do the knowledge site is still up at knowledge dot service now.com I know this sort of an indirect plug to the developer portal but it's still there you can go get that hands-on material on-demand use the instances that Craig spins up he does this in his sleep just out of the goodness of his heart yeah this is how I spend my weekends - please go check out developer at ServiceNow com there's a lot of great information over there and with that it's over to our subject matter expert why he showed up why he got to bed this morning and close the door on the kids Michael slobotnik it's over to you all right thank you very much Chuck yeah and when it comes to flow design an integration hub I can't believe it's been 18 months since we've really started to talk about it or at least on the tech now podcast as well so there's been a lot of changes as kind of the new workflow engine or new ish I'll say they've spent on the product management teams been wonderful for being able to be build it mature it bridge the gaps with the workflow engine or the older workflow engine and now it's the point where I want to say it's past what the capabilities of workflow could be and so it's really well positioned for that no low code citizen developer type of workflow as well as being a central center point for integrations so without further ado I mean there's been there's been so much on this and I've been working on this since it first came out working with the product management team as well going to knowledge and doing the lab I think this is my third lab now where I've done some flow designer integration hub so it's and the story keeps building bigger and bigger bigger and I'm running out of you know I'm not running out of things to present I'm just running I have too much stuff to present but you know a lot of the big things that have come out from what I've seen and worked with just in the flow designer piece and it's kind of important while people see flow desire integration hub kind of as one because you build the integration hub stuff within flow designer you know as kind of capabilities that they are separate so you know I kind of refer one in the other but then there's times I kind of mix them up so you know trying to keep that keep that straight but on the flow designer thing on the float designer piece you know getting into the decision tables and getting more from data driven type of workflow it's something a lot of us have always done Chuck I'm sure you build work built workflows where you have some table to hold data and the workflows making decisions based off that data well now we just made that as a basic how to box capability for the whole platform other type of things we've seen even in Madrid is just to start to get that parity with workflow itself you know in parallel do until run as has actually been really powerful and it kind of is very simple but you know in that sense of making sure flows can run as of somebody under their permissions the run-as-is is really critical for that but then also specifically being able to call workflows from flow designer and so one of the things that product management is really you know realized as we all all everyone realized with with flow designer when it first came out is the fact that workflows aren't gonna go away anytime soon so a lot of customers who have hundreds of workflows maybe thousands of workflows you know we can we're not expecting anyone to just move everything over like that and so flow designer self can call workflows so you can make things reusable and keep using what you already have and and as flow designer matures maybe you migrate over you know I don't know have any insight into if workflow ever go away but we've never really taken anything away that customers already have content management system being a great example but that being said you know there will likely be that time when we say hey workflow is not going to be turned on for new customers flow designers it and so and then integration hub is also a neat new key as well in terms of everything we have so Madrid was just once again getting in a pair parity with what we had you know being able to use the action API and this was really kind of neat where when you build these actions in flow designer which are also kind of the spokes if you will that we have an integration hub how do you call them from other parts of a platform anywhere you can script you can call same thing with just the improvements in slack attachment actions and just the constant maturity with different things you can do or customers can do without the need to code and that's what we're really trying to also do is just move away to more nolo code make it more powerful build things faster and if anyone's taken any of the labs that I've had you know that's hopefully what you got out of that as well a New York man New York once again some of the newer capabilities that I want to say kind of now or starting go past workflow email triggers was kind of a big one I don't think there's really been much of a change to inbound email actions hi since I can remember this is kind of the first time where I've actually seen it where it's like wow they have something else now we can have input for email and we can do all the logic without having to script Chuck I don't know if you remember having to script a lot of email but I am parsing things out it you know yeah I'm get a little cumbersome no but then some of the other things that we've really started to see is dynamic inputs as well and so you know this kind of goes with capability called introspection where if you have a spoke you know Salesforce book for example is is a good example of one that that's been being worked on before where you know what if data changes in that other system what if they add a new field you know the traditional old way is to go back to ServiceNow and have to go through and open up the flow or workflow and change how you know make sure that that new fields being called and that's you know it has extra development time over it with the dynamic inputs is now set up in such a way that when you use an action for example it can go through in query that other system to then bring additional parameters up into up into the menu as well so now you don't have to worry about factoring in for another field it's just gonna bring up all the available fields and show it very powerful I will admit you know the documentation site doesn't have it's got good information in terms of how it needs to be but you know it's powerful once you kind of figure out how it all comes together you know and then also with the waiting for duration as a percentage of time that's a huge one for SLS that's actually what was one of the key things that was holding flow designer back for him from being able to do the SLA workflow because everyone's always builds oh everyone always built the workflows like hey 50% of the time towards - la do this 75% do this we needed that in flow designer that's there now and then on the integration type things there's been a lot of really interesting and new updates as well I know you can everyone can read this in terms of the open API support and coming out with the sub flow to automate pass to reset but one of the I want to say smaller known integration hub actions that have come out or if your capabilities is the JDBC step so thinking about that when you think how ServiceNow does JDBC right now it's you know not too complicated it connects into a database and pulls data over and that's it but I've always run into the question of well what if we want to write to a database and the only answer we had up until New York release has always been hey we gotta use PowerShell I've done it before it's doable but you stuff to rely on like another technology to finish the integration with the JDBC step now we're taking sequel statements putting it right in the action and we're pulling data from from a database we're writing data to a database and it's actually really powerful I love to couple the JDBC step with remote tables because now I've got my remote tables for sequel row tables for other systems like you know JIRA for example and you know in terms of performance you have long as you're not doing a huge query it actually runs decently well all things considered and then Orlando of course with what we've had now is is I want to say this has been kind of really fun to work with you know on the photo designer piece getting into transform functions itself and it seems so simple but there's times where you bring data back and then you have to go right into like a scripting step to parse things or find maybe a maximum value the transform functions make it easy with right in the flow designer you can take a data element say I want to apply transform to it the lab that I did for knowledge 20 we get into that a bit and there's a lot of transforms for it I'm hoping that's gonna go out as you know more use cases come in but it's a really great step of that no code Loco direction of really trying to honestly compartmentalize the little things they used to have to script for you know and some of the other things that we've we've seen as well is the dynamics flows in some flows and that wasn't one of those things where when I first kind of heard about them I've tried to figure out how does this work whether the use cases for it and suddenly I realized oh wait a minute if I want to make a whole bunch of different sub flows and I give them a bunch of names and my lab actually covers this well don't I want to be able to have some dynamic data elements where I could say we'll call flow sub flow x cubs call some flow Y but without all the overhead of doing like decision tables or if statements and that's exactly what the dynamic flows and some flows does I can name you know a first part of several sub flows something similar and then I can maybe change the last you know some string of it or whatever and I've got a way to just call those based on names and once you start working with it it's really powerful because now you get out of a bunch of decision tables and you can take you know you end up taking flow that looks like it's your whole screen and cutting at least in half once you get rid of those decision and if statements really powerful makes things really clean Margo the other the other place I found sub flows to be very very helpful is anytime you may want to use it as its own library function not just from within a flow but from within a script because you can't pass parameters to a flow but you can to a sub flow so I'm asking myself almost every time does this really need to be a flow well you know obviously that depends on the trigger but could you build the bulk of your flow into a sub flow and then perhaps call it from a UI action a business rule a script action somewhere else that says hey I'm gonna need to run these steps but pass it this glide record or pass it this sis ID or I'm finding some flows to be extremely valuable more so than I originally thought well not only that so I use it for the exact same thing and then also I found out that when it comes to security like if I make an action for example that I want to write some data that may be typical for an administrator right now with the actions that you create you don't have the ability to say you know run a system you can only do that in sub flows so a lot of times I make actions and I wrap it in the sub flow to have that additional flexibility into what I'm doing so the majority of the things that I work with especially if I'm calling things from scripts for example most the time I build out a sub flow for it and then I call that versus calling the action directly or flows themselves some flows are really powerful you know and and it kind of seems weird to say well there's flows and some flows you know why have them separate I understand you know in terms of the separation flows to me are a little easier to kind of just build in general for the initial information up like triggers inside such but sub flows if you're really getting advanced sub flows or where it's at yeah and then on the integration stuff you know once again just improving a lot of the ways that ServiceNow can integrate with various systems themselves you know dynamic outputs that was something that came out more from different capabilities to have different day to come through especially if you start to consider how that can perfecter and with dynamic sub flows or maybe dynamic inputs and then you know Chucky's already says as well Damon data streams you know large data you know we live in a world where a lot of our customers have huge amounts of data and for data coming into ServiceNow they there can't be that limitation of you know whatever ten thousand twenty thousand records whatever they need to handle with large amounts of data and so those data streams and approving that is is incredibly powerful as well and then you see things like the client software distribution you know it's starting to replace things that workflow traditionally would do now in creation hub is doing it as things mature you know we'll also see a lot of our different products themselves that typically have workflow they're gonna start migrating flows over into into integration hub and flow designer as well so taking advantage of those new integrations you know it's incredibly powerful anybody who hasn't quite you know latched onto integration hub if you're in an organization where you have to integrate with a lot of systems you know just remember when it comes to how we're really building out the integrations integration is gonna integration I was going to have either a new out of box integrations are coming there or be new capabilities for integrations are going to be coming there this is our direction this is the way we're moving and you know it's really worth being able to start getting on that earlier than later so that we don't have a lot of technical debt where if you're kind of holding off the more you hold off the they'll you know longer it'll be where when you do want to finally move over and take advantage of that you may have more technical debt to do the migration or to you know go ahead and build it so really powerful I'm excited where it's going I like I said doing three knowledge labs at this point getting into working with product management and you know we'll also get into some demos right here and be able to talk about a little bit yeah enough PowerPoint let you see it see the stuff yeah exactly another let's be realistic I got my nice little list of things here I'm like alright what do I show there's so much stuff and we don't have a lot of time unless we can extend this maybe three more hours there we go we're good alright I would ask have a fiber I'll be um I'll be good you might want to see if we can boost the font size a little bit though oh I always forget to do that yeah good right I like it went five is good perfect all right should remember that I always forget you know and really the first thing I want to start off with is decision tables and decision tables like I said it's to help that data-driven type of workflow that we have and they seem a little complicated at first when you get into them and so being able to really kind of see and consider how they build together it makes sense but you just have to you know maybe see a good example of it in this case it's taking any what's known as an answer table so in this tape case it's a custom table but realistically any people you have in ServiceNow can be used to hold answer data in other words the output that you want of some decision and in my in my knowledge labs I always had something where we're ordering food so you know okay I like food and so I always relied on the decision table that for that so I here I have this custom table all it's doing is storing output answers of different types of food nothing crazy about it and if I then go to the decision table we now start to come up with how do we build this together and the first thing you have to keep in mind is that there's going to be some input to it in this case my input is going to be this key coded 19 case that I get that gets created so it's the type of story where an organization is keeping track of Cova type of requests maybe because employees report cases maybe they say hey I can't work because the child care they're just keeping track of this data to help manage it and so you have to keep in mind what elements have to come in for my inputs is it data on a particular type of record you know HR case incident case or could there be multiple records as well so being able to keep in mind clearly to think ok I've got my output table there great that's what it says here in my answer table I've got my inputs that are going to be other different tables ok great I have that and now let me put my decisions together and so when I have some kind of decision this is where I start to get in and say hey I need to figure out you know based upon the the information that's coming in from that input what the decision is going to be and I haven't keyboard i always apologize for it but i love it in this case i'm adding in a new decision say hey i want to be able to order I think White Castle food or maybe you know maybe some other fast-food type and I want to use my input that I had from my Kovac case so if you see I have Mike Ovid 19 case right here all those different inputs show up and in this case I'm even gonna show some related fields and I want to do something where you know what this person I have my affected employee and their state I'll say Ohio but caps is currently in Ohio gotta love it and then I just select my answer and the other thing and I don't know how many people really know this or not but this reference here if that's a known as a document type is service now's a way of being able to reference any table in the whole environment not just where you have to define a reference and that reference definition is pointing to a specific table document types are great for pointing anywhere funny funny you should mention that I just did a video on that yesterday document ID follows of the dependent table names you bet so go over to the communities and if you want to read more about that absolutely I recommend it I've been using documents more especially for things where like I said I want to have a reference that could be any table not just like maybe tasks tasks is great gets you a lot but doesn't get you everything and so once you got your decision table set up in flow designer it's really nice and easy where you can say hey I just simply want to add in a new decision and I can say well let's see order food I've got my decision table right there and I get my outputs based upon those decisions okay great so it's it's kind of like how workflow we used to have switch now we've got the decision tables for it as well well it's it also keep in mind decision tables themselves are also based upon they have an API so you call them from scripts there's also different conditions to match and it is really a simple type of of capability but now we are really moving towards that data-driven type of workflow where hey instead of having to check out a flow and make change changes based upon an if statement I can now go to go to maybe super users and say hey look here's your decision table feel free to go ahead and change the decisions however you want the workflow will handle it based upon those applets very simple you don't have to have admins to do it it's data-driven so you don't have to go through the traditional checking out the flow and publishing and testing you know maybe two weeks or so you can just make your change here like I said very simple but very powerful and as a platform feature you know it's it's helping move towards that direction where we just want to make things easier so yeah I love decision tables you know I want to say the only downside to them is if I if you add in a new output decision you'd then have to go through and and configure maybe workflow to say okay what's gonna happen for happen from this new decision and it's one of those things where I always kind of consider okay can you get out of that and realistically I don't think you can because now if you've got a new decision there's gonna be new activities and that you have to open workflow for but that being said you want to make a configurable to at least change the data that comes into it easy fantastic to do and then even then like I said before flow design or decision tables seem very simple very powerful another really simple powerful capability that I'm really starting to enjoy and really starting to kind of figure out in terms of how they work are those transform functions and I don't know if you remember but when flow designer first came out there was a big gap in it and it was a simple gap if you're kind of an experienced ServiceNow person it's very I want to say it was kind of a little annoying it was a type of thing where if you want to do some kind of simple data element like for example you know GS get user ID like something it's a it's a it's a method you know part of the platform you can you know type it in your in your sleep and you just wanted to get that and put that in there somewhere in the flow you really couldn't do it you had to create a whole new script action and it was really cumbersome then they finally came out with those script script lines where you can add that kind of thing great that was fantastic well now it's the same thing for those dynamic for those transforms where if you call some data element you don't have to always script it out to parse out or change data and a really good example that that I've been working with is just the idea of saying you know what if I get a bunch of different data that I need to transform in some way so one of the things that I've done from my lab is in when it comes to building out all these different capabilities I always create api's various api's to go ahead and work with it and one of those api's that I worked with was just pulling in a bunch of code in 19 cases you know based upon for example I'm gonna use Ohio where I currently live and once I get that data back the one challenge is though it's sending all the data back as an array you know very common to call api's and you get data that's mixed in somewhere and really if I want to go through then and have to sort that out the old way prior to Orlando has always been well you got to do a custom action script it out and it returned the value now I can do something where I want to get the actual number from that full array that's coming back I can go ahead and say hey you know what first of all let me do my activity here I'm updating a record I record that I'm updating is is my Co big case if you will and I just want to add in some of those work notes I am [Music] well this is where I'm always like is it is her arse I'm gonna say are I'm not a English major so I'm not going to worry about it too much but I can go ahead and for my data element and now I get this nice little FX part right here so similar to how we started to put in this you know inline scripting now we're doing this additional capability to say hey how do I want to transform this data and if you really go through it you've got a good amount in this case I've got I think I wanted to do math right here I've got a maximum number and the input is array so you do have to be careful what the inputs are in this case when I created that API I had to make sure that hey you know I've got to return the data as an array right but you're also starting to get into other different things like for example sequel and sanitizing a sequel value or being able to go through and say you know I want to do something with a string I just want to take maybe the last few characters of us of maybe a substring or maybe I want to put everything to uppercase or lowercase and so it's getting that flexibility without having to do a custom action where you're scripting now granted it's not gonna do everything but if it can do enough where 70 80 percent of your scripting is now out that's a pretty huge win and I almost want to say what same time that's another big thing as well because I I don't know Chuck if you've worked a lot with well I know you have but for anyone listening if you've listened if you've worked a lot with date and times and service now it can be a little tricky with the subtraction and adding and changing that we've got the way to just do it very quickly and easily but you know now there's that ability to say hey let's go ahead and pull off a max and add that in there so it'll cut off but we can see it and this is what I also really like about it as well you start to see this list of applied transforms so now it's not just one transform you may be doing a few different transforms that are that are taking place I one of the questions from when we had our our lab itself one of the questions that came up was hey is there a limitation and number of transforms product management itself you know came back and just said well they didn't put any limitations in the number you can have they say they pretty much said hey it's probably going to depend more on the UI because if you have twenty different transforms going on this list will get pretty big and that point you may want to consider doing a custom script but that being said you know being able to do those transformed functions very simple very powerful getting out of that you know cumbersome coding of a custom action again and I really like it like I said very similar to those inline scripts that they that they came out with as well I have to keep reminding myself those are there they can save you a lot of time yeah they a new kid I was just thinking the same thing yeah and you know what once again from those slides we had you know since the past eighteen month of updates man there's so much there I keep forgetting what came out I keep forgetting when it came out yeah so I'm always having to remind myself and as a developer my natural instinct is I'll just go write a custom action and use it a couple of times oh wait no there's a way to do a split on a sort right there don't need time man I'm guilty of that as well there's so many times I want to go straight to scripting and I keep forgetting oh I can do this I keep telling people now hey instead of scripting why don't you just build a flow out of it and then you just call that flow that was so powerful just oh yeah if it there's there's an inner voice that says well that was great Chuck that you did all this script includes stuff and outbound rest calls now go do it in flow so don't be me don't do it the hard way first and then have to redo your work yeah let Chuck be your bad example yeah exactly all right WWN CD what woodchuck would chuck not do WWC and be I don't know all right you know now I want to go ahead and get just kind of a step more technical dynamic inputs once again very powerful to keep service now especially with integrations very flexible adjusting to other systems out there but it helped really helping to be able to build out to say you know I want to build once and then have it be able to adjust automatically based upon it and I'll be honest I would definitely say dynamic inputs very powerful but there's a but here it's one of those things that will will would take more advanced scripting knowledge as well you know the type of thing that would be more for advanced ServiceNow developers that being said it's also incredibly powerful it's worth getting into as well in fact I definitely recommend go to our documents site dynamic inputs it talks about them more importantly it hasn't about the output of what it needs to be in order to work this I spent a little bit of time figuring out but that being said dynamic inputs are are actually kind of simple in the sense of hey you know what once again this is just another action out there so like any action if I have inputs I can call I can include my inputs but more importantly I can go ahead and have whatever activity I'm gonna to work with that's going to be dynamic so in this case I'm just calling a rest step i'm calling and my you know service now instant that's got this food ordering api with it and I'm just calling again and more than likely if you're doing the rest you're probably gonna be using get right you're pulling data and this is the tricky part here once I do my rest step and I get my initial response back I then have to parse it out and it has to be an output of JSON this is what I spent a little time figuring I'll hopefully other people will get this and be able to learn from it as well and it really comes to this I went through I scripted it out where I've got my if I remember my option array which then goes into JSON and the last step in there is to go ahead and format that JSON to say data and then there's my array of you know nested JSON data as well that has to be just like that you have to have it set up in data and then here's my for example label name whatever part music should be label a name for the data that's coming through and once you get that in place great you can pull data from anywhere but this was the trickiest part right here this does have to be specifically formatted and so you know worth getting through what I probably shouldn't do is make a script include and then just pop out on the share and you know make it easy but that being said very powerful once you get this built out because now when it comes to my various api's I've got one particular action to go ahead and order food and right now that action itself has everything hard-coded in fact if I bring it up here we go get food actions I she know I got the wrong one I think it's order food there we go this order food action right here everything's hard code and you can see that I've got my different item it's a choice it's doughnut Pizza White Castle I could have more options there but if that external system changed I don't know in this case I can go through and say you know what instead of doing this as a choice I want to use this as my dynamic choice and so now I just get that action that I just created and worked with so it's kind of interesting because we're using flow designer to flow designer integration hub to help make flow design integration hub more flexible that that was the big aha moment for me as well is that you have to first create that action that does the fetching whether you're fetching from ServiceNow or another system through rest or through a Glide record lookup you're building that list and that becomes your little subroutine that says go get the food options go get the account names go get the customer issue types you know whatever it is that you need to fetch and that becomes the choice list builder for you if you like and I went wow that's brilliant that we now have this dynamic inputs and dynamic outputs because like you said it's a bit of an inception moment where you say I have to build an action so another action can work dynamically okay that's pretty flexible yep exactly I mean it's very powerful like I said before you know the biggest part that I hadn't tried to get over was just how do i format the output from that once you figure that out oh okay I got this um now what I'm going through and saying hey you know what I want to go ahead and I have my action for I think I sugar food instead of having everything hard-coded I'm go ahead do my choice and now I have a bunch of options you know pita houses down the street for me wonderful wonderful falafel McDonald's whatever and as the data changes on that external system it's going to change here I think also out of box if I remember correctly there's already an outer box dynamic input actions to go ahead and query another ServiceNow instance to pool like available tables and then from that it can take an input from the table and then query and pull available fields as well and so there there is something there out of box for people to start to work with but and if you do integrations well our Box integrations with JIRA things looking up with Salesforce any external system if it if the data schema can change do dynamic inputs it's going to make it so much easier in the long run and I would definitely say that's probably one of the most advanced bands parts about it as well one of the other things I really want to get into from that whole list like I said there so much it's really just kind of getting into the power or sequel and I know that it's not really thought of in some of the use cases we have especially for cloud-based technologies but that being said there's still a lot of customers that have sequel databases out there and there's always that question of how do we integrate and like I said before prior to integration out prior to Orlando we always we had use PowerShell not that I can do it I figured it out and ServiceNow can save the scripts and you know decent but it wasn't very I want to say easy to work with in the sense of you have to write out all the PowerShell and figure out what inputs out are and everything now with what we have on sequel we've got the ability to have a step right here in the jdbc step so I have an outer box demo already with one of my demo instances where it's showing available sequel data in fact here it is right here if I do refresh my mid server will query sequel it'll pull data back it does take a few extra seconds because you got remember mid servers they only you know update every what 10 15 seconds whatever you set the setting for but here's a simple powerful part about it this is my JDBC step right here this is straight sequel and this is easy for people to understand I mean once you get the database connections set up easy I can go through and say you know what I want to insert new data and just like that's yeah I guess a copy the wrong thing but no problem because I got my piece spot here and I've got to set up where I've got an insert now so now when I go through I can test this and run this problem it's gonna do its thing I've now got my updated sequel and now I've got a great easy way to interact with my integrated databases and there it is 0:07 the guy Aaron sequel there we go and it's very simple but now you start understanding the power here it's like wait a minute I can pull data from Seco I can write data to sequel I can also write my inbound web services as well scripted work rest api's I now have a platform where I can actually hook up REST API s to my internal sequel databases I'm now getting really as as sure as now is an integrated you know and system for other use cases and not even just her service now it's the beginning of it's really kind of cool when you think about it but like JDBC stuff you could almost you know let's call it an end a greater itself because you're gonna be integrating with everything the platform of platforms before you could you could also use you know just another insight is your JDBC step could be instrumental in fetching data for your dynamic inputs or outputs it's like wow okay so mind blown on how many different ways you can put these puzzle pieces together exactly and so any customers that have those use cases where they've got maybe arcade databases with you know legacy systems or maybe just data out there that they're having to manage and you know they actually now have a solution that they could consider for integrations you know being able to take those sequel databases and make it a secure easy REST API without having a custom built in API it's actually really kind of neat when you think of those capability as well and some customers are really mature they've already got API endpoints available or maybe they have an enterprise message but a lot of customers don't it can do ServiceNow for it if you know and really our description REST API czar up ready actually actually pretty easy to work with and you can test them and very powerful all right good I've got a few more minutes left so I'm gonna take advantage of this and just kind of switch over to some of that dynamic sub flows and I know there's there's so much to get into I wish we had like another hour but you know that being said eighteen months from now when we get into the next the next webinar podcast and everything that's going on it's going to be or there's gonna be even more content that being said the dynamic sub flows check and I you and I were just talking about this you know some time ago the power of it where I can go ahead and take a templated some flow and this is the key part about it as well because you're gonna see here in a few minutes you come to that question to say you know if I call a sub flow how do I know what inputs and outputs I'm gonna be interacting with so having a template for your dynamic sub flow is key because when you want to go call that sub flow this is how the flow designer knows what to call but from this template in some flow that all it has is inputs and outputs and what's one simple log because you do have to publish it in order to publish a sub flow you have to have some action take place so a log is easiest way to do it and from this template I was able to just say hey let me go ahead and copy give this a name of maybe California at the end of it and you know then do my activities for you know something related to California as like a kovin reporting for the state of California and then maybe another one for Ohio and the really powerful use case of this is considering hey you know what in the story that I put together different state governments could have different api's available for reporting things or interacting with different different systems heaven forbid all 50 states you know really get standardized on some form of communication so what if you have to put all those in to interact with various state governments but you don't want to have a huge mess of decision tables or if statements and dynamic sub floors are great because you say you have your template from that template you copy and you know adjust accordingly for each state and now when I've got my flow in here I've got the new flow logic that says hey call it dynamic flow and the first part about this is you have to choose the template this is what you know takes a little bit to understanding here but once you choose your template you then have the ability to say okay well first part of my name is going to be report to state then I'm gonna leave it at the end of blank and then I can go through and say you know let's go ahead and do this for Co good case and I think I have my effective employee let's use their state I've got a dynamic sub flow for California one for Ohio you know ultimately you can potentially have all 50 yes you'd have to manage those some flows for each one like I said they all may have their different api's but you can make it where the main flow that's doing the work doesn't have to worry about that it's just calling the right one based upon some input and then there may be other information that once again we can have dynamic yeah I'm just putting number in Michael what is the purpose of the template at runtime it seems like you've already used it to create your California flow so what what purpose does it serve here I'm not clear on that so you don't see it just yet but you're gonna see here in a minute but it is to define what inputs and outputs are gonna be for the saw flow so the templates contain information and the flow is gonna read it to know what do I do so if you see these inputs here than putting in yeah it's getting that from the template got you because when you think about all these various some flows it doesn't know what it's going to call so it has to have some framework to know what the inputs are and outputs are going to be could you then tailor that say California needed one more input you would have to do you'd have to put that template so while you may not add any data for example if you've got the excess inputs you would put everything into the template because you don't know if you're gonna call California right so you'd have to put in the template and then if you call the California sub flow for example that's where you start to get a little bit cumbersome where you you may have to do some if statement or something to say okay this is a one-off case I don't want to add additional data to it got you um best thing to do is just have all those sub floats up close have the same input and then go to that sub flow specifically and figure out what data you're really going to use keep it in the South flow so my inputs are gonna be the same but maybe there's something I don't include like zip code because the state of California doesn't care and so I go through and using the name to say hey this is the supplement a call now once again you do have to do an extra step to say I want to pull some data out of my sub flow and once again this is where the template comes out so this is where we have a good get flow outputs because you got to remember we have a sub flow running but service now this flow technically when you're designing it the designer does not know which some flow is really being called so once again it has to rely on that template in this case I choose my template again in that context in the flow template and in the context that I have this time is that dynamic load that I just call so you can have multiple dynamic flows and then you're getting data from each one you know may be different data sets and there's my contacts record and so now when I'm going through and doing something like hey I want to update a record on that output from that guy named a flow see here my created record and maybe I've got a safe reference number now going to the data pill picker I've got my gift flow outputs and I've got that response number that response number is coming from the template so there are extra steps to use dynamic sub flows but however these what three lines on my flow designer is way cleaner than doing a decision table 50 states I don't really want to attempt that yeah so you know once again I'm designing it but I don't know what I'm calling so I have to use a template to know where my inputs are gonna be what my outputs are gonna be and you know getting the output but once again very powerful all right so before we go into just quick takeaways on this one so you know I probably said this if anyone's ever taken in lab with me but the biggest thing is focus on the design data-driven properties as well you know be able to make it flexible it's all about building quickly flow designer you can build flows much faster than doing the coding and then also get your apps into production you know there's a lot of app building platforms out there we're focused on get it in production quickly state of Washington in the Cova - we're a great example of that my team so my team got involved with it and they did design within a week and it boom they had apps out there you know very powerful and that's what it's all about documentation for all the stuff that michael has talked about is available on Doc's that service now.com the community I'll be posting this article there's lots of great stuff out there on flow if you've got any questions about flow design or integration hub please go there and ask questions there's a hundreds of thousands of people that are there to help I kid you not that's the number I heard recently developer not ServiceNow to come get yourself a free PDI one of the questions in the Q&A today was hey I'm trying this on New York can Orlando help I said I don't know the specifics but you go get a PDI on Orlando and try it out with very little risk to you your company and that kind of thing and all of these episodes we've been doing this for quite some time are available on let's see there's our PDI we're now closing a lot 80 topics in the last seven years so go check them out at the bit you see there and of course the Success Center so we do have some Q&A for you and don't forget yes I by the way real quick just to remind everybody that if you want to take one of the courses that were offered during knowledge they're still available so you can go do this through the knowledge site or is it now I think there aren't their own nail learning yeah the labs and workshops are now learning dot service.com you could type in the number if you know it I just went CCW 1429 there was the data stream one okay couple of questions we've been saving up for we've haven't been answering these alive in the background for the some of them if I build out a flow this is from Douglass if I build out a flow and then realize hey this should really be in a sub flow is there an easy way to quote convert a flow to a sub flow so that I can take advantage of the features you described like passing in parameters calling it from a script API with parameters that kind of thing that's a really great use case and I've done that I started flowing like oh man I should do some flow yeah there is not easy out-of-box way to do it I've looked at some of the tables before if you try to go to the tables it kind of kicks you to flow designer so you know product is trying to just keep you within the rails so this week currently there is not but that's a really good I think a really great use case is something I'm gonna go talk to the product manager and be like hey can we just have a little switch or something I think it should be possible yeah we're gonna be you know maybe a way to copy you know to another phone write or clone or something hey do you want to close those folks lower sub flow yeah yeah well have to talk to Jake about that one all right Thank You Douglas we will get you a I will publish your answer on the on the community afterward we have another one I'm not gonna try and pronounce the name because I will massacre this badly so look up record if a record isn't found you familiar with lookup record and lookup records and I'm gonna answer this one because I had this exact same thought in the shower this morning okay I do not this this is how recent this stuff comes in I'm working with this all the time so that's kind of fun if you do a lookup record and the record isn't found in the table flow designer stops and goes hey there was an error hey doesn't even throw an exception so you can go on you know like a try-catch in script and keep going is there a better way to do this and I was thinking about this myself this morning cuz I had to write a custom action and then I went no no no no no no no there is a way use you look up records say you want one record so the limit is one and it will return a parameter of count telling you how to zero if you didn't find the record one if you did it will not die it will just simply say I found nothing and you can do an if condition based on that count that was my solution I tested it 20 minutes and for this camera started I've had a lab or demo where the exact same thing I spent all this time saying I can't look up record tell me if it's not if its records works great just do it yeah use the plural lookup records and just base it off of how many you count and and if you want to just use the max count of one saying look I really only need one so if I've got a hundred million records in there and many many many of them match I really just want one just say fine I found one or I didn't find one that's your set limit if you're familiar with a glide record query for that so is there any way to create a variable and update it through subsequent steps ie a counter that can be updated a variable that can be shared between steps that sort of thing so not right now I'm not going to comment in terms of specifics I just know that that capability has been definitely talked about you know I got in the pipeline and I would reach out to your account team and say hey can we talk the product manager for flow designer and they could give you details I'm very happy because I was thinking the same thing I'm often creating a field on a form to count for me and then I'm making some yeah so yeah it's fans of scratchpad is all I'm gonna say yes I design a lot of stuff that's one of the things that has a gap product manager noted knows about it talk to your account team say can we talk to a product manager for flow designer there we go thank you Michael unfortunately we've run out of time we still have a number of questions left appreciate everybody joining us today thank you thank you again if we didn't get to your question again go to the community look for tech now so in a couple of days and I will have those posted there we'll do our best to answer them get deeper input and until next time Oh next time is going to be July 28th we have the Paris platform features you don't want to miss that because if you miss it live hey if you miss it live you will have to wait until September to see it on demand so if you want the latest platform features for Paris because early access starts about that time and shortly thereafter we're going to flood you with all these new features there's some interesting stuff coming there is watch that from I knew in Orlando definitely pick up a phone at 3:00 a.m. if you have to so with that we are out of time and I bid you a fond farewell thank you once again for joining us and we'll talk to you again next month if not sooner thanks Michael thanks Craig hi everybody 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