History, connections, versions, and settings
A smooth creation of a journey comprises integrating apps, establishing connections, and monitoring the execution each time a trigger and action sends and receives the data, respectively. While monitoring, a trail of successful execution or failure highlights the nature of a journey's response to the data flow. With the help of these insights, you can map the I/O data and figure out the variables (app data) used. As a result, you'll get a better idea about how your journey is executing and its reliability to automate the tasks.
In this document, we will take a look at the history, connections, and versions of a journey.
For better understanding, let's create a journey to Fetch a new email in Gmail and send a copy of it to another email via Gmail.
Upon the successful creation and execution of this journey, we will check the History, Connections, and Versions tab to study the dataflow of the journey:
If you are creating a journey for the first time, refer to Creating your first journey document for better guidance.
Log into Quickwork and create a journey inside a folder of your choice. Rename the journey, say Gmail to Gmail.
To set up a Gmail trigger for receiving an email, follow these steps:
Under the Event section, search for the Gmail app in the Apps list under the New Trigger option.
Then select the trigger event, Get email, from the Triggers list.
For authorizing Gmail, select an existing connection from the drop-down or create a new connection. To create a new one, enter the connection name of your choice and click the Link an account button. Select the Gmail account you want to authorize and allow Quickwork to access its scopes and information. Then, click on the Allow button. Your connection will get created.
Lastly, select the label (Gmail folder from where you want to fetch the emails) INBOX from the drop-down menu.
The Gmail trigger gets set up successfully:
To set up a Gmail action for sending an email to another person, follow these steps:
Under the Steps section, click the Simple Action option.
Choose the Gmail app from the Apps drop-down menu and select the action, Send email, from the Actions field.
Since the Gmail account is connected in the Triggers section, the connection field won't pop up again. Note: A journey cannot have multiple accounts of a specific app connected with Quickwork.
The following fields will open up in which you need to enter the details:
To (required): Enter the email ID of the recipient to whom you want to send an email. E.g., [email protected]
Subject (required): Enter the subject of the email you want to send
Message (required): Enter the email in rich format text you want to send. The entire email message field is RFC 2822 formatted and supports the base64url writable encoded string. You can also drag and drop the Body as HTML data pill from the output of the Get email trigger under the Data Tree Output.
There are some optional fields such as Cc, Bcc, Attachments, etc. to which you can specify the URL of the file and its name that you want to send with the email.
Once your trigger and action get successfully configured, click on the Save Changes button to save your journey. Then, click the Save & Start button to execute your journey. Now, send a new email to the connected Gmail account. The Get email trigger will keep searching for a new email received. If found, it will trigger the action configured. The Send email action will then send a copy of the received email to a specified email address.
In case you want to make any changes in the Action or Trigger fields while a journey is in the executing state, first stop the journey execution, proceed with the changes, save them and restart the journey.
Once your journey gets executed successfully, check out these tabs to better understand the data flow of your journey:
History
Connections
Versions
Settings
Each tab has its significance. To find out more, let's drill through the following sections.
As soon as you click the Save & Start button, you'll be redirected to the History tab. The History tab showcases the execution history of your journey. Each execution history has a STATUS and DESCRIPTION:
Click on the journey history to view it in detail. In Figure 5, you will see a detailed report related to your journey. It is as follows:
Status: The status of the journey once triggered. E.g., Succeeded, Pending, or Failed.
ID: The ID of the journey in hexadecimal format.
Time: The timestamp (date and time) when the journey got executed.
Processing duration: The time, in milliseconds, required by the journey to complete the execution.
Version: The version, in numbers, depicting how many times this journey got executed.
Event and Steps: It contains a set of I/O variables and keys associated with the fields of trigger and action in JSON format. It also features the actual data being fetched and sent to the app you have connected in the journey.
Click the Event statement to open the trigger data. It is divided into two tabs; Input and Output. The Input tab shows the variable(s) and its value(s) that you have specified as an input in the trigger fields while creating a journey. The Output tab highlights real-time data that the trigger has received during execution. This data then gets sent to the action we used in our journey:
Click the Steps statement to get the data that has been processed. This will give similar tabs as like triggers, but with different input and output. The Input data shows the variable(s) and its value(s) that you have specified as in input in the action fields while creating a journey:
In the Output tab, the SENT label ensures that the Gmail trigger has successfully sent a newly received email to a specified email address. Hence, the execution of our journey is successful and is now ready to automatically send the emails to other email IDs.
Filter the journey executions through their status. Click the Status tab and choose the option as per which you want to filter the transaction results:
The Refresh button helps you to reload the transaction if it hasn't after the successful journey execution. It also helps to reload the transaction if the journey has undergone the Pending state.
Quickwork allows you to re-execute the same journey with a single mouse click. When re-runed, the trigger event flows through the actions in the journey again. This feature is useful when:
You have edited the journey and want to test it
An error occurred in a journey, you've fixed it and wish to rerun the journey
Duplication may occur when journeys are re-run and the trigger event goes through the entire journey. So ensure to check and remove duplication (if present) before re-executing.
Click the Rerun button to re-execute the journey. The journey will re-execute with the same trigger event flushing through the actions down the line. Also, a new ID of the re-executed journey will be created on the History page:
The position of the journey will not change within the History section. The original journey execution that was rerun will be labeled as Yes under REPEATED emphasizing the execution was repeated a number of times:
The Connections tab contains all the app connections you have used for configuring a trigger and action(s) while building the journey. The connections are by default in an active state as you can see in the following figure:
The journey we created requires just one app to configure a trigger and action, i.e. Gmail. So, the Connections tab reflects a single active Gmail connection with a name, creation date, and option to switch the connected accounts or disconnect them permanently.
This tab shows all the connected apps that are used to configure a journey. You can switch between existing connections, disconnect them, and reconnect a new app as per your requirement.
Each modification that was incorporated in a journey and saved successfully comes up with a unique version ID. The Versions tab stores the details of all the journey versions depicting the version number, date and time the changes were made, the name of the modifier, and a label for the current version:
You can view the previous versions of the journey by clicking on a specific version number. The journey of that associated version will open highlighting the trigger and action(s) configured:
Expand the Event and Steps statements to view the modifications incorporated in the input fields. If you want to restore this version, click the Restore button. The restored version becomes the current version of the journey with all the input data of that version.
Switch off the journey execution when you want to restore one of its previous versions. If the journey is in the execution state, the Restore button gets disable and you won't be able to restore it.
To move out of the Restore version window, click the Back to journey link at the top-left corner of the screen.
The Settings tab contains a mechanism to generate a sharable URL of a journey. Users with whom the URL is shared can view the journey in one click. The URL is public and expires after an hour. Click here to know more.
