Best practices for Flow services

Follow best practices by fixing errors, avoiding cross-project steps, and setting up connectors.

• Displaying Flow service Syntactic Errors - If there are syntactic errors present while creating flow services, webMethods Integration displays error messages and offers guidance to users. Ensure that all syntactic errors are corrected to enable the successful saving and functioning of the flow service.
  Note: If any existing flow services contain syntactic errors, it can affect the flow service execution. Correct these errors and rerun the affected flow services.
• Avoid Cross-Project References - webMethods Integration does not support cross-project references. Avoid cutting or copying flow service steps from one project and pasting them into another project's flow service. This can lead to errors and inconsistencies in your flow services. Instead, consider using the clone, export, import, publish and deploy functions. Ensure that there are no cross-project references when you copy-paste the flow steps.
• Handling Inconsistent State Error - If you face an error indicating that flow services are in an inconsistent state after copying or pasting steps, follow these steps to resolve the issue:
  • Delete the step - In the destination project's flow service, delete the step that was copied from another project.
  • Restore previous version - Alternatively, consider restoring the flow service to an earlier version from the version history within the destination project.

  If you find that the preceding steps do not address the issue and inconsistencies persist, contact the support.

• Optimize Document Type Usage within APIs - Document types defined within APIs are intentionally designed for use exclusively within the scope of those APIs. It's essential to maintain this boundary and avoid accessing them in Flow services outside the APIs.

  Be mindful that attempting to access document types defined within APIs outside their designated scope can potentially result in deployment errors. It's important to adhere to these usage boundaries to ensure a smooth development and deployment process.

• On-premise connector -

  • You can import flow services using an on-premises connector to different environments. However, you cannot use the flow service until you configure the on-premises connector in the destination environment.

  • Ensure to configure the on-premises connector in the destination environment before publishing a project that has a flow service using on-premises connector. This is so because, the on-premises connector is not published to the destination environment along with the flow service.