Your first process
We're going to build a very basic process that will answer the following question "Is it the weekend yet ?"
Hit Create a process and let's start building !
As a first step let's rename our process.
By providing a good name for our process we ensure anyone can understand what it does.
- What do we need to do exactly?
We need to find out if the current date is Saturday or Sunday.
- Sounds good, how should we do it?
We should think about this process as a two-part job, first we get the date and then we check if it's on a weekend and interpret the result.
- OK, but we don't want to input the date manually, right?
Yes, we'll get the current date automatically so that we won't have to input it manually on every run.
- And how can we do that?
Let's check the Platform Actions section first to see if we can find an action that can get the current date.
- There seems to be a DateTime folder so let's look over there for now
Today seems like a good fit, let's check the documentation page to learn how to use it.
- Now we know how the Today action works, how do we proceed ?
We'll declare an Output variable called CurrentDate of type DateTime which will hold the current date provided by the Today action.
After this we'll connect the action to Start and Stop and make sure we've got a valid flow by clicking the Validate button and making sure no more errors show up.
When the process becomes valid, we'll hit Run to see if the CurrentDate variable has the right value.
- Now we got the date... How do we figure out if it's on a weekend ?
The thought process should be similar. We check the DateTime folder again to see if anything fits our needs.
Now that we found the perfect action, lets use it in our process to implement the weekend check. We'll declare another Output variable called IsWeekend of type Boolean which will hold the logic value of Is CurrentDate on a weekend ?
After this, we chain the IsWeekend action to the Today action and make sure our flow is valid.
Now we're done, let's see how your first process runs now 😁
- Somehow I don't really like the true and false stuff, is there a way to make is show messages?
It's a bit more complex but sure, let's make it show 'Yes' instead of true and 'No' instead of false.
We'll declare a third Output variable called Message of type String to store the message.
To convert the value of IsWeekend to a message we will use the following actions:
Let's build the flow now and make sure it's valid.
And there you have it, lets now run it to see how it works.
Congratulations! You have created your first process flow in PROCESIO!