Building blocks of a workflow

In short: a workflow step is always one block from a fixed catalogue. This article gives the overview of all blocks with their technical name, the label in the editor, the kind and the exits, and explains the rules that apply to many blocks at once. The full reference per block (all inputs, exits and output fields) is in six articles, one per group.

Where to find this

Account > Workflows, open a workflow and choose Add step. The menu groups the blocks by kind. Who: from the role Organisation admin; only an Account admin can change a workflow of the whole account.

The Add step menu in the workflow editor under Account > Workflows, with the blocks grouped by kind: Fetch, AI, Work on, Do, Decide, Repeat, Wait, A person and Agents.

All blocks

The block object.read (Read an object) still exists in older workflows and keeps working there, but you can no longer add it. Read the content of what an event refers to directly as a content field, for example {{trigger.recording.transcript}} (see Triggers and events).

The kinds

The editor draws each kind in its own colour and groups the Add step menu by it.

In the editor, agent.reply, agent.choose and agent.task are one agent step with a choice under Task. Switching keeps the agent and the task. In the definition they remain three blocks, because their exits differ.

Exits or “Then”

• A block with exits continues per exit (exits). In the editor there is a choice If exit for each exit.
• A block without exits continues with next (in the editor Then).
• Never both. An exit that leads nowhere, or a step without next, ends the run (in the editor End).
• Every step can also have onError (in the editor If this fails): the step the run goes to if this block fails.

Everything about routing is in References, routing, repeating and choosing.

Propose or do at once (mode)

Three blocks do something the outside world notices. They have the input mode:

agent.reply has no mode but send: there, the trust a person gave the agent per topic decides whether a reply may go out by itself (see Agents).

A proposal lands in To do and on the ticket. Leave a step on propose until the organisation trusts the workflow. If the proposals of the same step have been sent or carried out unchanged 10 times in a row, aishaa offers Do this itself from now on on the ticket to whoever may change workflows. An edit, a rejection or an expired proposal resets that count, and so does a new version in which the step does something different. After confirmation, aishaa publishes the live version again with only that step on execute. This is only possible for ticket.forward, message.send and plugin.action, and not while the draft of the workflow has other changes.

For whom (assignee) and deadline

Blocks that put work with a person (human.request, task.create, and in propose also plugin.action, message.send and ticket.forward) have an assignee (in the editor For) and usually a deadline.

• assignee is the user id of a colleague who may handle tickets of the workflow’s organisation, or a reference to the colleague the event mentions, such as {{trigger.recordedByUserId}}.
• If you leave out assignee, the work is for everyone who may pick it up.
• If the workflow names a fixed colleague who may not handle the organisation’s tickets, the step fails.
• If the reference from the event is a person who does not handle tickets, the work goes to everyone instead of failing.
• deadlineMinutes (Deadline (minutes)): 7 days by default, at most 30 days (43,200 minutes), greater than 0. After the deadline, the request or proposal expires and the step continues via expired.
• task.create has dueMinutes (Due in (minutes)) instead, at most 365 days; the run does not wait for a task.

Input types in the editor

Every input has a type. It determines which input field the editor shows and what you write in the definition.

Which plugin actions, read operations, record kinds, agents, labels, teams and colleagues an organisation has differs per organisation. The editor only shows what exists; an AI assistant fetches it with workflows_get_guide (see The workflow definition).

A new step does not start empty

Some blocks start in the editor with a value already filled in, so the step works almost straight away:

Good to know

• The technical name of a block never changes; it is stored in saved workflows.
• A step may have a label (in the editor What this step does), at most 120 characters: what the step does for this organisation. People read the workflow by those labels.
• A workflow has at most 100 steps. A run stops after 2,500 executed steps.
• Blocks that need a conversation (message.send, ticket.label, ticket.update, ticket.forward) fail or go via failed in a run that is not about a conversation, such as a run on schedule.due or recording.transcribed without a ticket.

Related

• Building blocks: agents
• Building blocks: people
• Building blocks: conversation and messages
• Building blocks: connected systems
• Building blocks: AI and editing
• Building blocks: deciding, repeating and waiting
• References, routing, repeating and choosing
• Triggers and events
• To do