Each time you add an action to a flow, Flow Designer adds a data pill to store its
results. The data pill name indicates its sequence in the flow and its data type.
Flow designers use action result data pills to provide input for other flows, actions, or
subflows. Flow designers can use the sequence value in the data pill name to ensure that
they select the correct data pill as an input value. When a flow runs an action, it
generates the data pill runtime value, which remains the same for the duration of the
flow. For example, if a data pill for [Trigger->Incident record]
gets populated with incident record values at the start of a flow, the data pill
preserves these values for the rest of the flow.
Data pill population
Flow Designer populates data pill
values as soon as the data becomes available regardless of where the data pill is located in
the flow sequence. For example, suppose that you have a flow triggered by the creation of an
incident record with the following actions.
- Update [Incident] Record that adds a text string to
[Trigger->Incident Record->Short description].
- Log the value of [Trigger->Incident Record->Short
description].
- Log the value of [1->Incident Record->Short
description].
Action-1 and Action-2 both use the data pill [Trigger->Incident Record->Short
description]. Since the trigger record is available as soon as the flow
starts, these values are set before running these actions.
Delayed data pill population
When an action, flow logic, or step includes more than one data pill in the same
input, the system delays running it until all data pill values have been populated.
This delay might produce unexpected values or prevent flow logic from running at
all.
For example, this flow produces unexpected values.
- Update [Incident] Record that adds a text string to
[Trigger->Incident Record->Short
description].
- Log the value of [Trigger->Incident
Record->Short description].
- Log the value of [1->Incident
Record->Short description].
- Log the value of [Trigger->Incident
Record->Short description] and [1->Incident
Record->Short description].
This flow produces the unexpected result of both data pills in Action-4 evaluating to
the same value.
