lev_jvdbemt love this thinking! There’s definitely an opportunity for exposing Data Tables in a more user friendly (and controlled, permissioned) way to allow the business to make config changes to control workflow. Completely get your point evan.yates but that takes away from the low-code/no-code message of Workato. If you find yourself having to build. (another) little app in another system, just to provide a basic GUI to front a table in Workato, that’s a lot of effort (and more to support). So it feels like a necessary workaround at present, rather than the ideal scenario. It feels like there’s huge potential (generally, but also in this scenario) with Workflow Apps, but at present, it still feels a bit too “SharePointy” for me! (Defined as “looks promising on first encounter but when you try to actually do things with it you quickly find you can’t do the things you expected due to so many limitations” 😆). Disclaimer: I hate SharePoint with a passion! It’s the application in search of a business use case. And I’ve never found a scenario for which SharePoint is the best answer. Technically you can eat a meal with just a Swiss Army Knife… but why would you? 🤔 (Your mileage may vary. Other opinions are available. Yes, I was bitten by a SharePoint installation as a child).
Since others have provided detailed feedback, I wanted to chip in on the bigger picture. In essence, I found the Academy to be an excellent experience for getting up to speed quickly, and one of the best vendor experiences for a tool I’ve encountered. It’s impossible to fit everyone’s learning styles and needs at-point-of-encounter, but for me with a bunch of years in IT and a coding/automation background wanting to hit the ground running with Workato as a tool, it managed to steer a fine course between assuming too much and being too basic. And in combination with the online documentation (and the community, obv), it’s enough to (more than) get started with implementing production workloads asap. Which surely must be the point 😀 And I say that as someone with a background in training and a keen focus on usability and user interaction (and who can be quite critical at times!). I guess one other thought is that, since doing my basic training and getting the Technical Developer sticker, I haven’t really thought to return (except on a couple of occasions to review topics I hadn’t used since the training). In short I think I’m saying I view(ed) the Academy as a place for necessary initial training, rather than an ongoing resource? Which may be doing a disservice to those who create the content! If so, perhaps there’s something to be done about raising the profile/shifting the perspective of the Academy as a resource for those who’ve moved on in their journey? But this might just be me!
EXCELLENT NEWS! So keen to see this! But still can’t yet… ⏳
Hi evan.yates. Thanks for your reply - always keen to hear responses that are not directly what's asked for 👍 Yup, I'm also a keen user of variables, and have thought of this trick and do use it occasionally. But I draw the line at creating/updating variables solely for the purposes of working around a system limitation (as it would be in these cases). I'm not keen on paying for extra tasks to fund a workaround 🤣 Hence the enhancement suggestion. But appreciate the response and it might be food for thought for others.
Job Report - Ability to Include "Result Schema" from a Recipe Function When creating Recipe Functions I often find myself exiting the Function and returning one or more values to the calling Recipe (see first screengrab). This is very handy but it does create an issue when customising the Job Report for the Function. That's because when customising the Job Report you're expected to choose the output from a discrete step in the Recipe to show in the output (see second screengrab). But the precise step at which the Recipe Function will exit depends on the exact logic followed for that particular Job, Referencing the first screengrab, one job might exit via Step 6 but another via Step 7. Since my code often has multiple Return points it gets very messy trying to include all of them (and it's a bit incoherent) so I don't bother. And therefore I hardly every use the facility to customise the Job Report - and that's almost criminal! So my suggestion is that, when working with a Recipe that happens to be a Recipe Function, there would be an ability to select from the "Result Schema" defined for that Recipe when customising the Job Report (see third screengrab). That way, regardless of which logic path any particular job took, it would be possible to see the returned values (in this case "Result" and "Notes") from the Recipe Function. In fact, it seemed so obvious to me that this is how it should work that I struggled at first to understand what was going on and why the Job Report only had values populated for Result and Notes some of the time. I can't believe I'm the only one who would find this useful. (Or perhaps I'm missing/misunderstanding something...?).
Hi Swagata R. I suspect the answer to your question is another question... "When is a csv file NOT a csv file?" The answer to which is... "When it's not been created by Workato!" I wonder if you've made the same assumption I did, that uploading a valid csv file to FileStorage should just trigger the Recipe and process the file (and why wouldn't you?). Except that if Workato did not create the csv, it won't be able to read it. I guess it needs to have pre-parsed the file to know the column structure? What I did in my Recipe was to invoke the "Create File" action first, passing in the contents from the file that triggered the Recipe, and then ensuring you choose Yes for the "Create CSV" file option. Once you've done that you can use the output from that Step in the Recipe (rather than using the Trigger data). See screengrab for a sample. I hope I'm wrong and this is unnecessary and I'm missing something. But this worked for me. (Waits for gary to come along, point, laugh, and school us in the Way of Worakto...). Cheers Russell
richy.mulcahy I take it all back. TELL ME ABOUT ALL OF YOUR TECHNICAL GOODNESS!! 😆
Hi John A. I get where you're coming from in seeking to understand the technical possibilities and what others have done. But rather than answer your (great question) I wanted to go off on what I see as an important tangent picking up on the saying... "For a man with a hammer everything is a nail". Or rather, to an engineer with Workato everything is an integration challenge 😀 Putting it another way... just because something COULD be done, doesn't mean it SHOULD be done. Everything is possible, but usually resources are limited and prioritisation is key and in this business requirements are key. So I'd suggest sitting down with your finance team (especially the button pressers that actually do the tasks each day) and asking them what takes them the most time, is most boring and repetitive and that they think someone should "magic away". Users may or may not have an understanding of the art of the technically possible, but they can certainly tell you what takes time and feel like little value add. These are (at least some of) the requirements of the Business. You can then quantify each scenario they flag (by asking how many people do this task x how often x how much time does it take on each occurence). That gives you the impact and how long it will take for "payback" (i.e. how many days/weeks/months of your solution being in place before the cost of your dev time is recouped). Prioritisation is not necessarily purely done on payback, but it certainly helps. And speaking to those in Finance management may also surface other higher level process inefficiencies and possibly other frustrations (perhaps more to do with data they can't see). Apologies if you know all that already, and for not answering your question directly. I'm sure someone else will be along shortly with a more direct response, but after many years as a Business Analyst and Product Owner (as well as developer) I can't let the opportunity pass to bang the "requirements not technology first" message 😆
Yes 😀 Over to you to try it out in your Dev environment...
