Flows — Concepts and terms
How to create an activity for use in flows
Understanding transactions in flow executions
How to unit test a flow
Atlas — Standard activities for flows
About Flows
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A flow defines a business process or part of a business process. A flow governs how work items are created, progress through your application, and become resolved (completed). A flow consists of a network of shapes and connectors (lines), each with associated parameters and values.
Flows are the fundamental rules that represent business processes. They determine who works on a work item in what sequence, what decisions and processing occur automatically, and other aspects of the business process.
After you complete and save the Flow form, click the Run toolbar button to create a new work item with the flow. (The Run toolbar button is available only for starter flows — flows with Creates a new work object? selected on the Process tab.)
Use the Process tab to constrain which users can execute this flow. Use the Parameters tab to identify flow parameters to be supplied when a flow execution starts. Use the Diagram tab to explore a flow interactively and preview the rules it references, including the runtime appearance of user forms.
Use the Diagram tab to edit the flow.
Flows that contain too many shapes can introduce complex, difficult-to-understand processing into your application. As a best practice, limit a flow to contain 15 or fewer shapes. If your flow grows to contain more than 15 shapes, revise the flow to call or branch to subprocesses to handle continuations, special cases, or non-mainstream processing.
After you complete initial development and testing, you can delegate selected rules to line managers or other non-developers. Consider which business changes might require rule updates and if delegation to a user or group of users is appropriate.
For more details, see How to delegate a rule.
Use the Records Explorer to list all the flows available to use.
Flows are part of the Process category. A flow is an instance of the Rule-Obj-Flow rule type.
Flows are normally stored in the PegaRULES database as rows of the pr4_rule_flow table.