Flow services

What are Flow services?

Flow services allow you to create complex integrations that require advanced data transformation and custom logic implementation. You can build a Flow service by adding steps and selecting the constructs, which includes Connectors, Controls, Flow services, and Services from within the steps. The Flow services editor is visually enhanced to offer ease of use and is interactive.

Flow services currently support a wide range of connectors and comes with several built-in services. Flow services provide you with rich data-mapping capabilities, a familiar debugging mechanism, a large collection of built-in services, and more.

A Flow service mainly has two parts:

  • Flow service signature
  • Flow service steps

What are Workflows and Flow services?

Workflows and Flow services enable you to automate and optimize tasks based on a set of predefined rules and business logic. These features give you the power to connect apps, devices, and on-premises systems with only clicks and zero code. Although Workflows and Flow services help you to accomplish the same goal, there are significant differences between both the features.

How to enable Flow services?

Flow services are made available by default for all tenants.

What is Smart Mapping?

Smart mapping provides you with recommendations while mapping the pipeline data and uses a series of algorithms to determine the likely accuracy of a suggestion, enabling you to toggle between high, medium, and low levels of mapping confidence. A machine learning (ML) algorithm is applied to provide the suggestions. The ML algorithm learns from the mappings that you create and provides suggestions automatically to map similar fields. The algorithm benefits from having more data from number of users. Click Smart Mapping to learn more.

How to change the time zone for a user profile in IBM webMethods Integration. The Execution Results and Execution History are shown in PST. Is there a place to configure the time zone preference?

Using the App Switcher, go to IBM® webMethods iPaaS and in IBM webMethods iPaaS, click Administration. On the Administration > Users page, edit the user profile. Under Locale information, select the required time zone. Save the changes, log out, and then again log in to see the changes.

Any timestamp displayed in IBM webMethods Integration is based on the user's registered time zone that is specified in IBM webMethods iPaaS. Not all the time zones in IBM webMethods iPaaS are supported in IBM webMethods Integration. If a time zone in IBM webMethods iPaaS is not supported, then the timestamp in IBM webMethods Integration defaults to the Pacific Standard Time (PST) time zone.

What are Conditional Constructs?

Conditional steps are those steps that do different actions based on the result of evaluated conditions or expressions.

Types of conditional constructs:

  • If
  • Else
  • ElseIf
  • Switch
  • Branch

What are Transformers?

The purpose of transformers is to accomplish multiple data transformations on the pipeline data in a single step as compared to using normal steps one after another. Transformers are services that are inserted into and run within a Transform Pipeline step. Transformers act as a collection of normal steps embedded in a single Transform Pipeline step. Click Core elements, constructs, and components of Flow services to know more about transformers.

How do I create a Flow service?

Click Flow services for information on how to create a Flow service.

How to trigger the execution of a Flow service from an external system?

You can trigger the execution of a Flow service from an external system, for example, a REST client, apart from manual and scheduled executions from the user interface. Click Flow services to know more.

How to debug a Flow service?

Click Debug Flow services for information on how to debug a Flow service.

Cannot copy text into a Flow service from an external source in the Firefox browser.

When using Firefox, you might encounter a limitation where copying text into a Flow service is not possible.

To overcome this limitation, follow these steps:

  1. Open a new Firefox browser window.

  2. Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.

  3. In the search bar, enter dom.events.testing.asyncClipboard to locate the specific configuration setting.

  4. Double-click the dom.events.testing.asyncClipboard entry to modify its value.

  5. Set the value to true.

  6. Close the about:config tab and return to the Flow service interface.

You can now successfully copy text into the Flow service.

Successfully created an SFTP connection by using password authentication within a workflow, but when attempting the same configuration within a flow service, it fails with the following error message: Failed to save the account <account_name> with given details. Error: Cannot retrieve the host public key. Details: Corrupt or unknown public key format. What is the issue?

The host public keys from Azure are available as provided in the following link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/secure-file-transfer-protocol-host-keys.

These keys come in various types, including ecdsa-sha2-nistp384, ecdsa-sha2-nistp256, rsa-sha2-512, and rsa-sha2-256. However, when attempting to create the SFTP connection within a Flow Service, none of these keys appear in the "Preferred Key Exchange Algorithms" section.

As a workaround, utilize the ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 host key provided by Azure and modify the key type to "ssh-rsa", as demonstrated below:

ssh-rsa AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHAyNTYAAAAIbmlzdHAyNTYAAABBBBmVDE0INhtrKI83oB4r8eU1tXq7bRbzrtIhZdkgiy3lrsvNTEzsEExtWae2uy8zFHdkpyTbBlcUYCZEtNr9w3U=

Save this modified key in a file and use the file as a Custom Host Public Key.