Enabling End Users to Configure Workflows | Jason McFeetors

moving forward it's uh it's the time for the last talk of this meetup and let's just get ready because whenever jason is you know in the meetup he always has some really interesting wonderful stuff to teach us so not gonna take more of that more of jason's time and jason the floor is all yours thanks a lot um every time that i come in here and uh you uh introduce me i feel less and less like i'm actually prepared to meet up the expectations that are coming out and i also noticed that i think i need to update my photo um that you have on the screen there i'm i look far too young and energetic compared to what i am now so today um i was given some thought earlier on the last couple of weeks after what to talk about and uh one of the things that i've been starting to experience is we we go and we do a lot of this building up of automations to make usually somebody else's life easier and what ends up happening is that they you know we get all this stuff in place and now what we end up doing is we have this other process that we've taken away from them and it kind of lands with us so i thought why don't we do a little bit of a presentation on pushing that back to them so what i've done is i'm just going to share my screen here is i have uh put together this wonderful little uh ended in workflow and so the scenario here is we have somebody who has uh um they've got this shopping list that once a week somebody goes out and gets all uh picks up all these items in an office and so the uh the person who's managing this came to me and said hey you know what is there a way that we can just you know have an easy way to add this information in so that people can go and put information into the system and then once a week the list gets emailed to the person that needs to send it out and we said sure no problem so what we did is we set up in base row a nice little shopping list and it's just whatever you need and then uh from base row because base rows kind of nice for this um it's created a nice little form that's just inherent built right into the base road there's nothing that we haven't even touched any then at this point and so it's you can go in here you can put in you know whatever you want it doesn't care you hit submit and it just shows up in your list so pretty straightforward nothing really rocket science sciency there and then we set up a cron node to uh every week on friday at 1400 hours it'll fire it off it will go it'll pull that list in format it properly and then send an email out to the person and i think we've got this going to uh tom example. com uh who's receiving this and they get the list of all the things that are that they get so pretty straightforward but now here's this one less task to do fantastic well of course anything that's good is not good enough and your boss comes to you and goes hey that's great but you know what tom's not going to be in on uh friday so we need to change that email address so he uh he calls you up and says that you know we need that changed and says okay who's going to do it always like i'm not really sure let me go and find out calls you back an hour later oh yeah it's going to be bill bill's going to do it okay fantastic what's bill's email address oh i'll get back to you so all this is just taking up your time wasting your time quite frankly so i thought why don't we just take this to the next level so we added in this little bit here at the bottom and essentially what we what i did is i created we were talking about forms earlier we created a little form and that's this little piece here and what it does is it creates a and of course i cannot see the rest of my tabs because of the tab bar at the top let's move that aside there we go sorry about that uh so that form looks like this and this will change shopper form and along with that we've created a shopper table so this is the piece where instead of now embedding the configuration inside of anything so that if i want to pass that work off

to somebody else i'd have to go in and i would have to give them access to naden we've actually got it stored in this database and when they come into here so this is the form that we've set up and again this all runs from this little workflow right here and all it does is it gathers the information when the form is submitted um it gets the present shopper and that allows it to show who the present shopper is here and then it just the last node generates the form and it splits around the html and that produces this for us so the other piece to that is the second one where the second web flow uh sorry web hook grabs that information when it's posted it gets the former shopper information and then sets the new shopper information and the reason it gets this is because it's going to overwrite that record it then writes that record to the database and say and it creates the response page which is just another html page so when i go into here and say okay it's going to be bill is going to be the person who doing the shopping this week and we hit a submit there we go so now billfold is going shopping and we'll notice here now bill is the person who is going to be doing the work so in order to make this work all we have to do is add one extra thing in here and right here we're going to add ourselves an extra node we're just going to add another base row node and we'll grab our credentials and we are going to grab from the office shopping list the shopper and we're just going to return the single one and when we do this you'll see that it will of course i don't know very good so now it's got bills information quick change here to an expression just delete this i'm going to grab the data from the previous node and now you see it's bill who's going to be doing the shopping so now instead of the manager calling me up and saying oh we got to do all this stuff we got to make all this work and you know calling me back three times because he doesn't have all his ducks in a row uh all we do is just say hey all you need to do now is go to this form you give him that url and everything gets done so i think this has a lot of implications doing this type of work and setting things up this way a lot of implications for our sanity as automators in our sanity as people who are managing this infrastructure it allows the user to have the flexibility to do various different things within certain realms and it eliminates those little interruptions you know because the interruptions are really what kills your day they say that a single interruption will take you about 20 minutes to get back um on track after you've gone and gotten off track so this here if you have to call you three times you've just saved yourself an hour of effort so you can take that extra long lunch break which is what really counts and that's it that's pretty much all i wanted to show you guys today um again it's not super rocket science but it's i think it's something that can you know looking at i know how hard all of you guys have to work i think it can make a big difference for you and i'll just send that back over to marshall