0:02 Hi, my name is Angelik Laboy Torres, I'm a Developer Advocate here at Retool and today 0:07 we'll get started with building workflows. 0:11 Many times we have repeated or background processes like publishing content, handling 0:17 onboarding of our teammates, or doing customer requests, tasks that happen regularly in the 0:23 same order. 0:24 A workflow is simply a series of steps that happen the same way from start to end. 0:28 It's like a checklist that delivers consistent outcomes every single time. 0:34 Now, Retool Workflows allows you to build complex automation that interacts with any data source, 0:39 transforms data, uses AI, or is able to do what it help triggers as well as custom scheduling. 0:49 Okay, so what we have right here is our Retool space. 0:52 And if we go into the Navigation Bar, you can see Workflows up in there. 0:55 So we'll click on it. 0:56 And this is where all of your organization's workflows will assist. 0:59 The best thing is that you can duplicate or reuse them across other apps as you build them in your 1:04 organization space. Now let's go and click on create new and then click on Workflows. 1:11 This is now going to open up our workflow IDE, which is a visual canvas to build automations. 1:17 And it has four main stages. Firstly, of the canvas, which is where you would arrange your 1:23 blogs in order to build your workflows. Then you have the left panel. And as you can see, 1:27 there's many different tabs in here. Some of them include blocks, triggers, as well as configuration 1:33 options. From there, you also have the toolbar, which is where you can rename your workflow. You 1:38 can either run them or publish them, do different versions of them as well. And then lastly, you 1:43 have the status bar, which is where you would do the version control of your environments, 1:47 whether you want to work on staging or production. It's really cool. You can even add more. You can 1:52 You can also see the version and then how many times this workflow has run and what were the results of them. 1:58 Cool. 1:59 So let's close this over here. 2:01 Now, one thing about Workflows is that they always start with a start trigger. 2:05 And this is actually going to define how your workflow runs. 2:08 So you can notice here actually from this interaction, how blocks are connected to one another. 2:13 There is support and you can drag from there to create another block in order to create the next step of your automation sequence. 2:22 Now, let's go back to the left panel over here. 2:25 And let's start talking about the essential tabs 2:28 that you can see in order to configure your workflow. 2:31 So in the plus icon, you have all the blocks available to you. 2:34 We'll cover them in a second. 2:36 So you can add them into your canvas, right? 2:39 The same way that you can vote an agent, et cetera, et cetera. 2:43 From there, you have the outline, 2:45 which is allowing you to see all the different blocks 2:48 in your workflow. 2:49 This is particularly helpful as you start creating huge connections to one another and 2:53 you have a lot of branches and you just kind of want to see like a drop down of everything 2:57 in the canvas itself. 2:59 Then you have functions, which allow you to create reusable logic that can be called by 3:05 other blocks. 3:07 Then you have triggers. 3:08 This can be there to configure a webhook or schedule it at a very specific time. 3:15 Then you have, well, the code search, right? 3:18 Searching anything particularly. 3:19 Then you have libraries, and this is where you can import any custom JavaScript or Python 3:25 libraries. 3:26 Right? 3:26 Then you have the different releases, which I mean, and you know what releases are, as 3:33 well as the setting, which allow you to either deploy or configure your environment. 3:38 So now that we have a better understanding of what our workflow IDE looks like, then let's 3:44 start building our first automation. 3:49 So let's build a simple automated email workflow. 3:52 So for that reason, I've started off like cleaning up all this canvas and I've deleted 3:56 the default code. 3:58 And from there in the start trigger, I'm actually going to pull from the port and add a resource 4:03 query. 4:03 If you're actually questioning what this is, we covered it in the last few videos of the 4:07 getting started. 4:08 So just go and check out that playlist. 4:10 Now from there, I'm going to click on retail database. 4:13 And the reason being is that I already have this table over here that has like 11 users 4:18 that in contain information like first name, last name, company, email, I'm just going 4:22 to use that in order to send out this weekly update that I want to do. 4:27 So from there, I actually just going to make sure that it runs and like all this is fine. 4:32 I'm going to do select all posts, all from top users as the name of it. 4:40 Their email is not NULL and this actually needs to be in quotation because otherwise it won't 4:47 detect it. 4:49 There we go. 4:50 And click on the play button and then wow you have a preview of your data. 4:55 Now I just, I don't want all the information so I'm going to do first name, last name, 5:02 I'm going to do email and I'm going to do company. 5:07 Awesome.
and I'm gonna rename this get users. 5:11 That works for me. 5:12 Click on the play. 5:14 We have this array now. 5:15 Awesome. 5:16 So what I wanna do now is actually start adding 5:19 some other logic to this workbook. 5:22 If I pull from the port, 5:24 you can see all the other blocks that are accessible to you. 5:26 So I'll give you a little bit of a breakdown here. 5:28 First you have the research query, 5:29 which allow you to connect to your resources 5:32 and any sort of like query information. 5:35 stuff that we've been working on in our app IDE. So if I go back here, actually, you can set up 5:41 your resources by clicking on the resources tab and then from there create new and click on resources 5:46 and you have I mean, so many of them. Yeah, Google Sheets, GraphQL, MongoDB, Firebase, 5:53 Retool Storage, I don't know, like OpenAI, OpenAPI, RestAPI, so many, right? Even like Notion. 6:00 So once you set this up one time, you don't need to do them all the time. 6:04 And that is what this is for. Then you have code. So this could be like anything like 6:09 adding a JavaScript or Python. I will make a note here, but you could because it's really 6:13 helpful for so many people. You can add a block of code whenever you want. Like you don't have to 6:17 like use any of these blocks if you don't want like go code it. I think it's no problem. 6:24 In the same way that like in the libraries, you can also add any sort of like custom 6:28 libraries like from NPM. Keep that in mind. Then you have workflows which allow you to connect to 6:36 other workflows. Pretty meta. Then you have the AI actions. And to show you a little bit of this, 6:43 this is the Retool AI. And here you can generate like so many different types of actions from there. 6:50 You have stuff like generate tags, summarize tags, classified tags, generate image, 6:54 track entity from an image. You also have all these different types of models, 6:58 all these different types of versions, as well as controlling the temperature, 7:02 even adding a Retool vector. Okay, so close this down. And then let's move on into the next one, 7:09 which is invoking Agents. The agents that you have generated over here, let me go and show you 7:15 the agents tab. You can actually access them inside of your workflow. So you'll click over here, 7:21 and whatever agent you have you can click on in the habit run and like execute as actions. 7:27 I'll close this down and then I'll cover now a little bit of the other ones that you see over 7:32 here you have filters filter out any sort of values brand child you know brand child into 7:38 different areas loops specific logic or add a delay to your workflow which would be wait. 7:45 The last one actually is response which allows you to return a response within your workflow. 7:50 This could be helpful, especially when you're having your workflows be used inside an app and 7:54 like see like if there's any like errors that are happening in the back end, you can receive a 7:58 blog of them. And yeah, this is pretty helpful when it comes to what hooks. So I'm going to be adding 8:04 a loop. And from there, you can actually see that because it was already attached to the previous 8:09 block, it already knows that this is the one that is going to be using the information from 8:14 hence the sequence, right? 8:16 If there are any sort of branches created, 8:18 then you can start selecting which one you want specifically 8:22 that's looked to run from. 8:23 Now, in terms of execution modes, 8:25 you have parallel, which runs all at the same time. 8:27 It's more for speed. 8:28 You also have sequential, 8:30 which allows you to do one at a time, 8:32 as well as batch, like batching by group sizes. 8:35 And then also have a delay between these groups. 8:39 Now, I wanna do parallel. 8:41 And what I want to do is actually select a Retool email inside of it. 8:44 I'm going to call this email schedule. 8:47 Cool. 8:48 And I mean, you know what an email composition looks like. 8:51 So let's do value.email. 8:56 There you go. 8:56 This information is all coming from this array over here, which is pretty awesome. 9:00 The, this is called weekly update. 9:03 And I'm going to say hi value first name. 9:07 (upbeat music) 9:10 value last name. 9:15 - You are 24, value of 20. 9:17 (laughing) 9:18 - We have received some. 9:19 We have received some news. 9:21 - Leave it at that. 9:22 And then I can include a signature. 9:23 I'm just gonna uncheck this, 9:26 do an attachment or even add a reply to, 9:29 or even like CC, whatever you want. 9:32 It's just a normal EVA, right? 9:34 So what I actually wanna check before, 9:37 or I want to show you before I actually click on the play button, is that when you refresh, 9:46 if this block hasn't been executed, then this one is going to give you an error. 9:51 There you go. So you always have to, like if you're testing them out, you have to do the previous one 9:57 before you continue with the sequential block. Just the stuff when you're doing trial and error, 10:04 I see a lot of people like mis-stepping on this. 10:07 Cool. 10:07 Oh, I'm having some issues here. 10:11 Value. 10:13 Donate email. 10:14 Cool.
It wasn't capitalized from this. 10:19 Amazing. 10:19 Let's see if this works 'cause I put myself there. 10:22 Voila. 10:23 There you have it. 10:25 I have my name, my last name as well as the company 10:28 and obviously the email because I received it. 10:30 So that is how the looping area works. 10:34 I do want to set up now a trigger. 10:38 So let's go over here in the left panel, 10:40 and then from there you can click on the lightning. 10:42 And right now we have it set it up as a webhook. 10:45 I don't want that, let's do a scheduling. 10:47 So I mean, the same old does click over here. 10:50 And let's do like once a week, 10:53 let's do UTC on Monday and at nine AM. 10:59 Cool, awesome. 11:00 And you can even select like which environments 11:02 that come in from. 11:04 For dope, I'll save this. 11:06 And then also another way to access this 11:08 would be on the start trigger. 11:09 You can click on edit trigger 11:11 and then you can enable with risk through a Webhook 11:13 or a custom schedule. 11:15 I guess something to keep in mind is that 11:18 when we're dealing with more advanced event driven processes, 11:22 Retool also supports Kafka and Amazon SQS 11:28 in terms of integration's workflow triggers. 11:31 This allows you to pull messages 11:33 from existing message queues 11:36 and automatically trigger workflows 11:38 that run when message are received, 11:40 which is really perfect for real time event processing 11:46 without maintaining separate infrastructure. 11:49 Now that this is all done, 11:51 let's actually just like run this. 11:54 Let's click over here. 11:55 And then it would open up a log window 11:58 there you can actually see how long it takes. This is important, especially with that the loop that you have running if you're running them parallel. 12:06 Obviously, we're talking about scale right now is only 11 users, but keep that in mind. We got the green. 12:10 Oh, you can even see more information like the JSON input data and everything close this. 12:15 And I'm going to keep click publish and I'm going to do a major version release. 12:21 And it's something really important, 12:22 even though it auto saves in the canvas itself, 12:25 if I were to make a modification, 12:27 like adding, I don't know, 12:28 block of code or something like that 12:30 and have this executed and then do a response 12:34 and then this be okay, 12:38 like this be fine, cool, save in, all good. 12:43 You have to republish it again 12:45 and you can do this whether it is as a major, minor, 12:48 or patch and that is because when you're using them 12:51 the app, it would only have the last official release, not whatever has been worked on on 12:57 the canvas. So really important to keep that in mind. And so that brings us to the end of 13:03 our video. Thank you so much for watching. This was really interesting. Just getting to 13:07 teach you about like a walkthrough of the workflow. In the next few videos, we're going 13:12 to be covering more about, you know, forms and inputs. And I really want to challenge 13:18 you to go into our community forums and actually just create a fun workflow. Like send it over to me 13:24 tag me I want to see what you create and so uh thank you so much this was really fun and I'll see you 13:30 next time!
