Create Your Second Flow

In the next example we will use some external services. We start by polling a service that delivers random Chuck Norris quotes through a REST API. Then we extract the relevant data from the response and send it to a Slack channel.

Follow these steps to create the Flow

Prerequisites

You’ll need the following to complete the tutorial:

1. A webhook for the Slack channel is needed, read more on how to set it up here. If you don't want to use Slack, try some other notification module, like SMTP Send or Twilio. You can also skip this last step and still get valuable insights.

Building the Flow

1. Create a new Flow in the Flow Studio
   

2. Add an Interval module and set the interval to 0. This module generates repetitive triggers at the specified interval. By setting the interval to 0 and having "Run on start" set to true the module will trigger once when the Flow starts.
   

3. Next we will make a request to the Chuck Norris service. The easiest way is to add the dedicated Chuck Norris GET Random Joke module. If you want to try a more generic approach you can also use the HTTP Request module and set the URL to https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random. In the next steps we assume you use the Chuck Norris module.
   

4. At this stage it's a good idea to test what we've built so far, so we can see what the response from the Chuck Norris service looks like. Start a remote session, enable debugging on the Chuck Norris module and start your Flow. It can be hard to see the full response in the debug window. Use the menu on the message to open it in a separate pop-up window. As you will see you get a rather complex message from this module. The joke that we are interested in is nested in the hierarchy of the message. To reference the joke text we use the following syntax: cn_joke.body.value.
   

5. Next we want to use the joke and create a message that we can send to our Slack channel. To do that we will add a Text Template module. With this module you can add generic text to your message and in the text reference data from the incoming messages. Any property references you put inside {} will be replaced by the corresponding value from the messages. Add the following settings:
   Target Property - Set to: data.text
   Template - Set to: Check out this joke: {cn_joke.body.value}

6. Now run the Flow again but enable debugging on the Text Template module. Make sure you get the expected result on the data.text property.
   

7. As the last step will will add an output module, in this case the Slack module. To use this module you need to create a webhook in your Slack account, see the link above for instructions.
   Make the following changes to the settings:
   Webhook URL - Set to the webhook you created
   Channel - Set to the name of the Slack channel where you want to publish your message
   Username - Set to your Slack username
   As you see there is a text field in the module settings where you can enter a message text. If you use this field the same message will be sent each time. In this case we want to use message text from the incoming messages. With this module all settings except the Source Property can come either from the settings or from the incoming message. If you leave a settings field blank the module will expect to find the information on the relevant property in the object assigned to the Source Property. In our case we wanted to take the message text from the message and therefore we assigned the text to the data.text property in the Text Template module and then set the Source Property in the Slack module to data. You can read more about this in the module documentation, by opening the Documentation panel from the module settings.

After completing this exercise you should have built a Flow similar to this: