Building a flow in Zoho Flow involves selecting a trigger, adding one or more actions, and optionally inserting logic elements to handle conditions, loops, and delays. This article covers the main components available to you when constructing a flow, whether you are starting from scratch or adapting a gallery template.

Building a Flow from Scratch

From the Zoho Flow dashboard, click Create Flow and choose Start from scratch. Give your flow a name and an optional description to help you identify it later. You are then taken to the flow builder canvas, where you begin with an empty trigger node.

Trigger Types

The trigger determines when your flow runs. Zoho Flow supports four main trigger types:

• App trigger: The flow starts when a specific event occurs in a connected app, such as a new deal being created in Zoho CRM or a new row being added to a Google Sheet.
• Schedule trigger: The flow runs automatically at a set time and frequency, such as every morning at 8 AM or every first Monday of the month. Useful for generating reports or sending regular notifications.
• Webhook trigger: The flow is activated when it receives an HTTP POST request from an external system. Zoho Flow generates a unique webhook URL that the external system can call. This is useful for integrating apps that are not natively supported by Flow.
• Date and time trigger: The flow runs based on a date or time field within a record, for example sending a reminder three days before a contract expiry date stored in Zoho CRM.

Actions

After setting up the trigger, add an action by clicking the + button on the canvas. Select the target app and the specific task you want Flow to carry out, then map the data fields from the trigger (or previous actions) into the action's input fields. You can add as many actions as your plan allows, chaining them together in sequence.

Common actions include creating or updating records, sending emails, posting messages to team chat tools, and adding rows to spreadsheets.

Logic Elements

Logic elements let you build conditional and iterative behaviour into your flows:

• If/Else (Decision): Branch the flow into different paths based on a condition. For example, if a deal value is over £10,000, notify the senior sales manager; otherwise notify the standard sales team.
• Loop: Iterate over a list of items returned by an action. For instance, if a trigger returns multiple line items, a loop can process each one individually.
• Delay: Pause the flow for a specified duration before the next action runs. Useful for sending a follow-up message 24 hours after the trigger event.
• Wait until: Pause the flow until a specified date or time is reached before continuing.

Custom Functions

Custom functions allow you to write Deluge scripts within your flow to perform data transformations, calculations, or logic that goes beyond what the standard action nodes support. For example, you could write a custom function to reformat a date string, calculate a commission amount, or parse a JSON response from an API.

Outgoing Webhooks

If you need to send data to an external system that is not available as a native app in Zoho Flow, you can use an outgoing webhook action. Configure the URL, HTTP method (POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE), headers, and request body, then map data from the trigger or earlier actions into the payload.

Creating a Subflow

A subflow is a reusable group of actions that can be called from within other flows. If you find yourself repeating the same sequence of steps across multiple flows, extract that sequence into a subflow. This makes your flows easier to maintain: updating the subflow automatically updates everywhere it is used. To create a subflow, navigate to Flows, select Subflows, and click Create Subflow.