Building and saving a workflow
Turn a one-off into something you can run again: add steps, save a draft, publish it, and it appears in Workflows with its own run, schedule, trigger and share actions.
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A saved workflow is the unit everything else hangs off. Until you save, you are experimenting; the moment you do, the flow gets a card on the Workflows page and with it the ability to run on a timetable, be started by another system, be shared read-only, and take a spreadsheet of items.
Start one
- Workflows → New workflow for a blank canvas, or pick a template and edit it.
- Name it something you will recognise in a list of thirty. The name shows up in run history, notifications, shares and the API.
Add the steps
The minimum useful flow is four cards: a start, a batch of items, one AI step, and somewhere for results to land. Templates come wired that way. In Simple view you add steps to a list; in Map you drag cards from the palette and connect them. Either way see the card reference for what each one is for.
Each AI step needs two things before it can run for real: a pool (the keys it runs through) and a model. For the model, press Browse rather than typing from memory: it suggests ids you have run before, the ones FlowArray ships, and anything your price catalogue knows — while still accepting any id you type, so a model released this morning works too. Everything else — the instruction, retries, whether to reuse output — has a sensible default.
Save a draft, then publish
- Save draft stores your edits as the current draft version. Save as often as you like; a draft is yours to keep changing.
- Publish freezes the draft as a numbered version (v1, v2, …). Published versions are immutable — the next edit opens a fresh draft on top, so publishing never blocks you.
Why it matters: a run pins a published version if one exists, otherwise the latest draft. So publishing is how you say this is the one that should run — and it is what stops an in-progress edit from changing what a schedule or a trigger fires tonight.
The Builder's top bar shows the current state ("Draft v3 · Published v2"), so you always know which one a run would use.
What a saved flow can then do
From its card on Workflows:
| Action | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Run / open | Opens it in the Builder to run now |
| Batch | Upload a sheet of rows instead of typing them — batch import |
| Schedule (clock) | Runs itself hourly, daily or weekly — schedules |
| Triggers (webhook) | Lets another system start it — triggers |
| Share | A read-only link for someone outside the workspace — sharing |
| Duplicate | A copy to modify without touching the original |
| Export | The flow as a JSON file — export and import |
| Alerts (bell) | Admins can silence a noisy flow's notifications for everyone |
Members and owners/admins can build and run. Viewers can look but not change or run — see Roles.
Two habits worth forming early
- Dry-run before you spend. The Data tab shows exactly what each item will send, with your values filled in, for $0.
- Publish before you automate. Anything unattended — a schedule, a trigger — should be running a version you deliberately published, not whatever you were mid-way through editing.