Building flows

Annotate your flows to make them easy to understand at a glance. These annotations might benefit another flow builder in your organization, or they might benefit you if you haven’t worked on the flow in a while.

To add an annotation to the flow canvas:

Use annotations to describe what happens in the main steps of the flow. Although there are rare occasions where a single node should have its own annotation, in most cases, you should use one annotation for each logical grouping of nodes.

On the Settings tab for each node, set the Node Title to a meaningful name that describes or identifies each node. This name appears in the flow canvas and, combined with the annotations, makes it easier to read the flow.

For example, consider the following flows. They are identical aside from node titles and annotations.

Recommended:

Not recommended:

To make it easier to see the connections and overall structure, align your nodes in neat rows and columns. Avoid overlapping nodes and clustering them close together.

Begin your flow with a single node that serves as a clear starting point. If you include loops in your flow, don’t loop back to this start node. Instead, loop back to a later node.

Large images and assets should be hosted on a CDN and referenced from the flow, not packaged within the flow.

If you are creating a very large flow, you can use Teleport nodes to connect different sections of the flow. This makes the flow more readable by breaking it down into discrete sections. It can also let you reuse some sections of the flow rather than duplicating content.

If you’re including an input element in an HTML or other user-facing node, include an ID:

You can reference the value entered by the user later in the flow using this ID. The ID must be unique across the entire flow.

There are some limitations in flow creation, such as a maximum number of node exections and a maximum number of saved versions of each flow. Review these limitations before creating flows, as they may affect the way you create and update your flows. For more information, see Flow limits.

The more complex the goal of a flow is, the more planning and testing is required to ensure that the flow works correctly. When planning a flow, bear in mind that some tasks and elements will increase the complexity and testing requirements:

If you don’t want an existing node to be part of the flow, delete it entirely instead of disconnecting or disabling it.

If you don’t want to use a flow, delete it to make it easier to find relevant flows.