ImposeIQ Flow Designer guide

Overview

Flow Designer draws the same workflows the Automation Workflows window builds as a step list, as a flowchart instead. It uses the same steps and the same engine; when you save, the drawing becomes a workflow the engine runs on its trigger. Open it from Home under Hot folders, or from the Workflows window.

File › Open… lists your workflows, with flows drawn here first. Opening a step-list workflow lays its steps out as a flow; it is only changed if you save.

Drawing a flow

1. Start with the green Start shape — the trigger. A flow has one Start, and nothing can lead into it.
2. Drag steps from the left onto the canvas. The list is grouped like the Workflows window — ImposeIQ apps, Check, Prepare, Impose, Marks, People, Data, MIS and Output — and the search box finds a step by name.
3. Hover a shape and drag from one of its blue dots onto the next shape to connect them. Drop a step onto an existing arrow to insert it there.
4. Arrows may join back up or loop back to an earlier step. A path with no arrow out simply ends the job; an End shape makes that clear.
5. A Note is for you — double-click it to write. It does nothing when the job runs.

The trigger

Click Start to choose how work arrives: a watched folder, a schedule, an FTP or cloud-storage folder, a webhook, or a manual run. Its settings are the ones the Workflows window has — the folder to watch and the file types to pick up, how often to check, whether to group files that arrive together into one job, and so on.

With a manual trigger, use Run now… at the top to pick files and process them.

Steps

Click a step to change it in the panel on the right: its label on the canvas, its settings, and Step switched on — switched off, the job passes straight through it. If a step needs an ImposeIQ app that is not connected yet, the panel says so.

The Workflows window’s question-tree routing step is edited there; in a flow, a Decision shape does the same job and is drawn on the canvas.

Decisions

A Decision diamond looks at the job and takes the Yes arrow or the No arrow. Give it a question for the canvas (“Did preflight pass?”), then what to look at:

• Preflight result
• Approval result
• The AI’s answer
• Page count, page width or page height
• File name
• Number of files in the job
• Source folder name
• Any job variable a step before it sets

…and the condition: is, is not, contains, starts with, ends with, is greater than, is less than, matches the pattern, is empty or is not empty.

The first arrow you draw out of a Decision is Yes, the second is No. Click an arrow, or use Swap Yes / No, to swap them. The panel shows where each one goes; a branch with no arrow ends the job.

Working on the canvas

The grid can be shown and snapped to, and Tidy up the layout straightens the whole flow.

Checking, saving and running

The badge in the toolbar shows what needs fixing, in red for what stops the flow and amber for what is worth a look:

• No Start shape, or more than one
• Start not connected to anything, or a watched-folder Start with no folder chosen
• A setting a step needs left empty
• A Decision without a Yes or No arrow — that branch ends the job
• A Decision looking at a job variable with no variable named
• A shape not connected to Start, so it never runs
• A step whose ImposeIQ app is not connected yet

Click the badge, or an empty part of the canvas, to see the list; click a problem to jump to its shape.

Save (Ctrl+S) compiles the drawing into the workflow. Click an empty part of the canvas for the flow’s own settings and switch it on: it then runs by itself from its trigger while the workflow engine is running. Save as a copy…, Delete this flow… and Open the Workflows window are in the File menu.

Run now… picks files and runs the flow on them straight away. The shapes light up as the job moves through them; if it fails, the shape where it stopped turns red. Clear run highlights in the status bar puts the canvas back.

A workflow drawn in Flow Designer opens in the Workflows window with a banner and an Open in Flow Designer button instead of its step list, because reordering the steps there would break the flow’s jumps.

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