Project Development

Do not use more than five transfer steps in a flow

Troubleshooting and further development are easier when transfers remain well-organized. Additionally, if repetitions are necessary (e.g., due to failed transfers), you’ll avoid performance losses. “Transfer step” does not refer to the number of item links: a single step can certainly include many individual transfers. “Transfer step” refers to the chronological sequence of transfers that you see when you hover over the item link with the mouse.

Flow Templates Save Work

If you already know during project planning that you’ll need many (more than 10) similar flows—which differ, for example, only by an ID and a few data point addresses—you should familiarize yourself with the concept of flow templates. You create the flow template with variables in the “Templates” snap-in and use it to generate the similar flows via the drop-down button “Create instance”: individually via the menu item “Create Single Instance...,” from an Excel or CSV file via “Create multiple instances”, or at runtime via “Create Dynamic Instance”.

Extract recurring logic as a function (FX)

Templates and functions serve two different purposes: A template generates many similar flows from a pattern, while an function (FX) has, since version 5.7, kept recurring logic within otherwise different flows in one place and is called by any number of flows. This also contributes to the five-step rule: Externalized steps no longer clutter the calling flow’s overview, and the logic is maintained only once. For branching in the flow, the Condition (IF) transfer object is also available—both are sub-workflows .