- Building Flows
- Overview
Building Flows
Overview
The main components to build automations with Activepieces
Builder Components
To build business automations with Activepieces:
- You will add Pieces to a Flow.
- Organize multiple Flows into Collections.
- Test the Flow and then Publish the Collection.
Choosing a Trigger
When you add a new flow, it will ask you to choose a trigger. The trigger controls when or how often this flow will run.
You can choose the trigger by clicking on its name in the right panel. Go to the Triggers page if you’d like to know the different types of triggers and how to use them.
This is how a new flow will look:
Adding Pieces
To add a new piece to your flow:
- Click on the + button after any of your existing pieces in the flow.
- Use the Pieces Panel to the right to find the right piece and click on it to add it to the flow.
The piece will be placed in the position of the + you selected in the beginning.
Piece Settings
When you add a piece to your flow, or if you click on an existing piece later, you will be able to change the settings in the Piece Settings Panel to the right.
We will let you know if there is an issue with the settings by these highlighted indicators. You will be prevented from testing or publishing your flow until you fix these issues.
Passing Data
Automations work by running a sequence of steps when an event happens. Data should be passed across these steps to be reused later.
We currently support a specific syntax to refer to data from previous steps or config variables, you can learn the syntax in the Passing Data page.
Publishing
To start the automation, you need to Publish your collection.
Click on Publish on the top of the screen. This will save all new changes into a new version of the collection and enable it.
You can stop the automation later by switching off the Enable toggle of the collection.
As long as the collection is enabled, each of its flows will start listening to its trigger. If you’d like to monitor your flows, read the Debugging section.