Introduction to Steps

Steps are the building blocks of your Flows. They are what make your Flows do what they do. In this section we will go over the basics of steps, how they work, and any gotchas you may run into.

The Basics

When a Flow is triggered, the steps in the Flow are run in order from top to bottom. Every Step has its’ own configuration that you can tweak to your needs, these will be gone over by Step Type in the next section. Any text input in any Step supports the use of inline variables via the { and } characters. For example, if you wanted to use the username of the chatter who triggered the Flow in a message, you could use the {sender.name} variable. This would be replaced with the username of the chatter who triggered the Flow when the Flow is run. You can find a list of all available variables here.

Inputs and Outputs

Every step is ran with an input, and most steps have an output. The input of a step is the output of the previous step. This means that if you have a Text step that is set to Hello World, followed by a Send step, the Send step will be given the text Hello World. This is because the Text step has an output of Hello World, and since the Send step is the next step in the Flow, it will be given the output of the previous step as it’s input. This is the case for most steps, however some steps do not have an output, in these cases they will simply pass along the input they were given.

Logic Steps

Logic steps are steps that do not have an output, and are used to control the flow of your Flow. These steps are If, Else, and End If. These steps are used to create conditional logic, and will be gone over in more detail in their own section. But for now just know that these steps are the only steps that can change the Flow of your Flow, meaning that they can cause the Flow to skip steps.

That’s really all there is to know about steps at a basic level. Next we’re going to go over each different Step Type in detail, and talk about their configurations as well as how each step works.