Work with Flows

What Is a Flow? 

A Flow defines an automation combining both a workflow and the flow of data. It contains the individual steps necessary to automate business processes.

How to Work with a Flow?

Create a Flow within the Flow_Studio to build an automation. From the Flows overview page, schedule your automations to run at specific times or have them triggered by events.

A completed Flow contains Input(s) specifying what data to bring into Hero Platform_, functions to build your automation, and Output(s) to write the data back out of Hero Platform_.

Examples of using a Flow include extracting data from any web interface, filling out and submitting forms, or updating and interacting with web-based and business applications.

Flows Overview Page

View the Flows overview page by opening Automations and selecting Flows in the menu.

The Flows overview page displays all of your current Flows.

You can view the:

  • Flow Status:
    • Successful
    • Running 
    • Failed
    • Canceled
    • Never run

          Mousing over the status icon displays additional information. If the Flow has failed, an error message is displayed in the tooltip. 

  • Flow name - Name given to identify the Flow. Click name of the Flow to view the automation in Flow Studio.
  • Last run - The last time the Flow executed.
  • Inputs-  The number of input fields the Flow contains.
  • Outputs - The number of output fields the Flow contains.
  • Rejected - The number of fields that were rejected during the Flow execution.
  • Runners - Runners traverse the nodes in the cluster. A node can have multiple runners. Multiple runners can be used for processing a single flow. More runners allow the system to do parallel processing. E.g., If you have four nodes and one node is processing a large amount of data, more runners allow for parallel processing. The total amount of memory used for the Flow (both machine memory and JVM memory) is displayed directly under the number of runners. As nodes finish their tasks, they can take additional load. 
  • Schedule - The current schedule setting for Flow execution.
  • Last modified: The last time changes were saved for the Flow. See how long a Flow has been running by checking the Flow's Run Details.
  • Creator: The user that created the Flow
  • Settings:
    • Edit - Select to edit the configuration of the Flow.
    • Clone - Select to create a duplicate the Flow.
    • Delete - Select to permanently remove the Flow.
    • Configuration - Select to edit the Flow's:
      • Name
      • Max parallelism
      • Max retries
      • Execution mode
    • Schedule - Select to schedule when a Flow begins to run.
    • See Details - Select to display details of a running Flow. Details include throughput, pull latency backpressure, and status.
    • Show Run Details - Select to display the logging data for each time the Flow was run.
    • Export - Select to download the Flow as a .zip file.
    • Stop Flow - Select to stop the Flow.

 Resize column widths by dragging the lines between column headings.

Filtering Flows

A filter bar is located above the Flows on the Flow overview page. This filter can be used to filter for Flow names or Flow Creators.

Scaling Flow Execution

The processing power required for each Flow executed is dependent on both the amount of data being processed as well as the configuration settings.

The required computing resources for each runner is up to 256MB. Any required containerized images or in-memory buffers used for the aggregation require additional memory.

Create a Flow

Learn how to create a new Flow.

Use Flow_Studio

Learn how to use Flow_Studio.

Flow Studio allows Hero Platform_ users to visually create data flows. After selecting a previously set up data Input, you can use a repository of manipulation and machine learning functions that are available to point-and-click together simple or complex data flows that are eventually streamed into an Output. Data flows can be linear but also support circular structures.

Flow Execution History

Platform Hero_'s has a service that logs all the Flows that have been run with their statuses and details. The entries in the execution history are deleted after 30 days. If a job ran successfully and no inputs were read, then that entry is deleted from the execution history after one day.

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