Private and Public Flows

When developing your App you add functionality to it by creating public and private flows

Private Flows

Private Flows are flows that can be called internally within your App (e.g. from your public flows) but these flows will never be visible to users of your app.

When you first open the Private flows page you may notice that there are already some private flows created for you. These flows help in establishing and maintaining a connection with the external service that your App is connecting with. More information around each of these flows can be found in the connection page

Let's create a Private Flow that will be used to call the Weather API from our public flows called "Call Weather API"

This flow will be quite simple. It will take as input the URI and Payload to call and execute a Call API to the WeatherAPI service:

Trigger

Call API

We could also extend this later to handle errors & retries that might be returned for our service.

Public Flows

Public Flows are flows that will be visible to your App's users as stages within your App and should be represented as those functions that you wish your App users to call.

Let's add our first stage to the weather App that we will call "Get Forecast".

The name of the public flow will be the stage name that the user sees so it's good practice to name it in a way that's easy to understand and that properly describes the main business function. Try to use the action (verb) as the first word such as Get, Fetch, Update, Set etc

In the flow builder let's set a required input of Location and call our private flow to retrieve the weather for the location specified. We will then add the response to the return of the public flow so that the data can be used in the user's flows after calling this stage.

That's it, you know have your first Public Flow ready to run and once you test it you can proceed to publish it so that's available in the App Marketplace for others to install.