Using Converter Flows

Last Updated: 08/11/2016 Introduced in Verision: 2.0

Converter flows are flows designed to transform one type of data into another, and which are implemented as a mapping type. To use a converter flow in the Mapping Editor, select the input or output which will handle the converted data and change its mapping type to Run Converter Flow, then select which of the available flows should be used as the converter flow.

 
Converter flows can run for both input and output. Input flows can have any number of inputs to them, but only one output with same data type. Output converter flows can have any number of outputs, but only one input of the same data type.

Example

Our example flow is called Display Converted Email. It will retrieve a list of email addresses supplied by a converter flow – Get Email Address List – and display them in a form. The converter flow already exists, created in the topic Building a Converter Flow.

Open the Display Converted Email flow by clicking the Edit link on its thumbnail to open it in the Flow Designer.

Our flow consists of two steps: Get All 1, which gets all of our system’s user accounts, and [Form] Display Converted Emails, which will display the email addresses of those accounts.
flow
 
To convert our user accounts to email addresses, before displaying them in the [Form] Email Address List Form, run the collection through a converter flow in the form input.
 
Click on the [Form] Display Converted Emails and in the Properties panel, click Show Mapping Editor.

By default, Get All 1 is configured to output a list of Account objects.

To configure Get All 1 to output a list of email addresses instead of Account objects, change the mapping type to Run Converter Flow.
 runConverterFlow
 
 
The Mapping Editor prompts us to select a flow to be run as a converter flow. Select the flow Get Email Address List.
 pickTheConverterFlow

We also have the option of selecting a specific step output to use. We will select the output CreateorCopyData1_EmailAddressList and give it a mapping type of Pass Through so that it can be used in our flow. This completes our mapping for Get All 1, so we can click OK to close the Mapping Editor.

 passThroughConverterOutput

To display our list of email addresses, we need to configure our form. We will select [Form] Email Address List Form and, in the Properties panel, click the link Show Mapping Editor.

showMappingForForm

 

We will map the output CreateorCopyData1_EmailAddressList (provided by our converter flow) to our input Emails List. This completes the mapping for our form, so we can click OK to close the Mapping Editor.

mapping

 

Our flow is complete.

flowIsComplete

 

When we run our flow in the debugger, we are presented with a list of emails – each one belonging to a user account in our system.

Note that in Decisions version 3.5 and above, you’ll need to click Test Flow to access the debugger.

 

result 

 

Additional Resources