I’ve created a rather complex workflow, but would like to use the same steps as part of another workflow. Is there an easy way to copy a sequence of steps, or an entire workflow into another one? I don’t really want to have to keep 2 windows open and try to swap back and forth trying to make an exact duplicate.
I know you can export a workflow, but it’s output it too complex to try to cut and splice things in there.
Thanks.
Right now there’s no way via the workflow builder to copy steps or sequences of steps to save/use in other workflows. This is something the team’s talked about a lot though, and we may want to implement it in the future.
The easiest option for you in this case may be to export the workflow, import it with a different name, then remove the steps you don’t want and keep the sequence of steps you do.
If yall are considering working on this. Please consider this: Workflow abstraction.
For example, we can get alerts from many products. While those alerts might be handled differently as a whole, there are common steps in all of the workflows. For example, all of these alerts will open a jira ticket and assign it to an analyst that is on duty (global artifact). We have to tweak these steps from time to time. But, we have to every workflow when we do. Sure, we can export, edit, import. But, that is still a pain.
It would be better if there were some workflow abstractions, i.e. we could call another workflow. I realize this complicates things in terms variables and what data is available to the caller and callee workflows. But, I think this can be manageable since it can be designed as if they were just parameters to a function. Just my $0.02.
Also, I know we can call other workflows via the api/curl. However, this does not exactly solve the issue, because you have to add workflow steps to massage the data when you get it back. Thus, you still have to edit every single workflow, each time you make a change.
Thanks for the feedback. Based on how you described your current workflows, it sounds like you’d want to have a workflow that contains those common steps like creating + assigning a Jira ticket, which is then called by the other workflows. Is that right?
That definitely goes together with the saving/copying/reuse of steps that we mentioned above, and is something we’re looking into as a way to make workflow building and maintenance easier. We’ll likely know more about the direction we want to take in early 2021. That being said, if you’re open to it we’d like to get your feedback along the way, and potentially have you as part of our user testing if we do end up going down this road.
Yeah, there are processes that are common across multiple workflows, and it’s a bit of a pain to have to re-create them in each workflow. Ideally a copy/paste capability would be best, but being able to shunt out to another workflow would be another option.
Copy-n-paste works initially. But, if you have to go back and change something, you have to do it to all workflows that you initially copy-n-pasted to.
It does per-line, but I’m thinking more about being able to select a whole branch of a workflow at once, copy, move to another workflow and paste it in there. Agree, you’d have to go back and fix the references to that workflow, but would save a lot of work and swapping back and forth between windows.