Build your own upgrade-safe workflows with Flow Designer and automated tests

[Dawn Jurek]

Getting users the roles they need is a company-wide hassle—you have to ask the user's manager for approval, then ask the System Administrator for approval, then wait for the System Administrator to update the user's record—all over email. There has to be a way to automate this process!

Then you have a brilliant idea. How about a Service catalog item that allows any user to select a user and a role, requests the approvals needed and adds the role to the user record when the approvals are received?

You share your idea with your development team, and they love it:

"Great idea - a catalog item processed with a Flow Designer spoke! Be sure to build an automated test at the same time, so we can verify it still works after upgrades, K?" 

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," you say. "I'm not a programmer - I was just bringing the idea to you guys!"

"You don't need to know code. You can do this." 

Ushered out with a pat on the back, you realize you're on your own. 

Flow Designer spoke? Automated test? Yikes - you might have gotten yourself in too deep! 

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No worries - we've got you covered!

In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series list, we provide a quick primer on Flow Designer spokes and automated tests on the Now Platform®, and in our video below, we show you how to build a Flow Designer spoke concurrently with an automated test.

What is a Flow Designer spoke?

A spoke is a scoped application containing Flow Designer content dedicated to a particular application or record type. Flow Designer provides a set of core actions to automate Now Platform® processes. You can add application-specific core actions by activating the associated spoke. Here's a list of some of the available Flow Designer spokes, or you can build your own:

• Benchmarks spoke
• Connect spoke
• Customer Service spoke
• Field Service spoke
• ITSM spoke
• Security Operations spoke
• Visual Task Board (VTB) spoke

With a subscription to IntegrationHub, you can also integrate with external instances and third-party applications. Here are just a few of the spokes available:

• HipChat spoke
• Microsoft Teams spoke
• ServiceNow eBonding spoke
• Slack spoke

 Spokes appear in the Flow Designer within the action selector:

What is an automated test?

An automated test is a custom test that you build in the Automated Test Framework (ATF) to validate functionality prior to production deployments. You can run automated tests to confirm your instance works after making a change such as after an upgrade, during application development, or when deploying instance configurations with update sets. 

Automated tests provide an alternative to manual testing, and eliminate human error from the testing process.

When you build your automated tests, be sure to follow the recommendations in our post Best Practices for using ATF.

How do I build a Flow Designer Spoke with an automated test?

The detailed demo in our video below shows you how:

For more information:

Flow Designer (product documentation) 

Spokes (product documentation) 

Build and run your first automated test (product documentation)  

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Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to deliver critical information to our customers. We’ve found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.

To access all the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.