Updating your Flow

In Parabola, it's easy to edit the draft version of your Flow without interrupting the active version (the version that can run) until you're done editing.

Once you build a new Flow for the first time, you'll see a button to "Run Flow" in the top right corner of the navigation bar (in blue). This will simultaneously publish the Flow, and run the Flow for the first time.

Once a Flow is run for the first time, you will able to navigate to the page that will show you the “published” version of your Flow: this is the version that runs whenever you click "run" or schedule a run. To see the published version of the Flow, click the “Preview” button in the panel under the Flow name.

The published Flow page is also where you go to set scheduling rules, view the run history for a Flow, see data sent to the Destinations in your Flow, and view Table output generated by that Flow.

Once on the published Flow page, you can edit this Flow by clicking the "Edit draft" button on the top left of the Flow preview panel. You will be presented with a dropdown menu to either “Continue existing draft” or to “Replace with a new draft” which will discard you existing draft and replace it with the published version of the Flow.

While editing your Flow, you can click the blue "Publish Flow" button (top right) to publish your edits. Your edits will not be used in any Flow run until you (or a collaborator) click the “Publish Flow” button.

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Running your Flow

There are four different ways you can run your Flow:

1. Manually
2. On a schedule
3. Triggered with a webhook
4. Triggered with an email attachment

Manually

You can manually run a Flow by either clicking "Run Flow" in the top right of your canvas (when running the Flow for the first time), or clicking the "Run Flow Now" button in the Live view of the Flow.

On a schedule

You can schedule a Flow to run automatically by going to the published Flow page and adding a scheduling rule. You can set your Flow to run on a certain day of the month, once per day, every hour, every 30 minutes, or every 10 minutes (depending on your Parabola plan). You can also specify which days of the week your Flow should run and specify run times and the time zone we should use.

The scheduling rules you set can be viewed by clicking "Add schedules/ triggers" beneath the Flow’s name on the published Flow page or by clicking the lightning bolt in the upper right corner to open the Schedules / Triggers panel. If you ever need to edit an existing schedule, click on the pencil icon next to the schedule in the panel. You can edit the scheduling rule, or delete it altogether by clicking "Remove this trigger."

You can also pause and resume your schedule at any time by clicking on the "Pause existing Flow schedules" and "Resume Flow schedules" buttons in the Schedules / Triggers panel.

Triggered with a webhook

You can trigger a Flow with a webhook. To configure this, go to the published Flow page. Under the Schedules / Triggers panel, select "Add a webhook trigger." A pop-up window appears with a webhook URL you can copy and paste, as seen under the button "Regenerate Webhook Url".

Once you highlight and copy the webhook URL, a graph will appear below. You can refer to this graph to see successful and failed webhook invocations in the last 7 days. To learn more about using webhooks on Parabola, head here.

Triggered with an email attachment

You can trigger a Flow to run from an email attachment by clicking "Add an inbound email trigger" link in the Schedules / Triggers panel.

A window will pop up with instructions to follow. This is where you can find and regenerate the email address you should use to send email attachments to. Once we receive your CSV or XLS file to that designated email address, we will run your Flow automatically.

Post Flow run information

Flow History

You can view your Flow’s run history by either clicking the Last run information listed under the Flow’s name on the published Flow page or by clicking the Flow history icon in the upper right corner of the page. This will open the Flow History panel which will show you Successful and Failed Flow runs as well as the information around those runs.

Destinations

You can see what data was last sent to a Destination step in your Flow by scrolling to the bottom of the published Flow page to the Destinations section. This section has a table with tabs that correspond to each Destination step within your Flow.

From this section, you can view the data that was sent to the various steps, search through the data using the Search option on the right side of the table, and open and look at the step settings with the “Open step” button on the left side of the table.

Tabs in the table can be moved from left to right either by dragging and dropping, or by clicking the three dots on the top and choosing to move it in either direction. The overflow menu on the far right side of the table will also allow you to scroll through multiple destinations and select a tab to view.

Parabola Tables

Any Parabola Tables that were created with the Flow will appear on the published Flow page. You can read more about Parabola Tables here.

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