History, connections, versions, and settings
A smooth creation of a journey comprises integrating apps, establishing connections, and monitoring the execution each time when 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 end 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 version history, connections, and settings of a journey you have created.
For better understanding, let's create a journey to Fetch a new email in Gmail and send it to another email via Gmail.
Upon the successful creation and execution of this journey, we will check the History, Connections, Versions, and Settings tab to study the dataflow in 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 Journey Builder and create a journey inside a folder of your choice. Rename the journey, say Demo Journey.
To set up a Gmail trigger for receiving an email, follow these steps:
Under the Trigger section, search for the Gmail app and click on it.
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 Journey Builder.
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 gets successfully configured, click on the Save Changes button to save your journey. Then, click the Start Journey 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 Start Journey button, you'll be redirected to the History tab. The History tab showcases the execution history of your journey. Each execution history has a unique ID, Start date, and Description:
Click on the journey history to view it in detail. In this window, shown in Figure 5, you will see some important data related to your journey. It is as follows:
ID: The ID of the journey in hexadecimal format
Version: The version, in numbers, depicting how many times this journey got executed
Status: The status of the journey, i.e. Success, Pending, or Failed
Duration: The time, in milliseconds, required by the journey to complete the execution
Trigger 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.
Clicking on the Trigger statement will open the trigger data which 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:
Clicking on the Steps statement 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 send the emails to other email IDs automatically.
Filter the journey executions through status, repeated label, and description. Click the Filters option and you'll get the options to sort the history results:
To remove the applied filters, click the Filters option again and click the refresh icon to reload all the transactions.
Quickwork Journey Builder allows you to re-execute the same journey with a single mouse click. When re-runed, the trigger event will flow through the sequence of 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 be sure to check and remove duplicates (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. For example, a journey that was first processed on 02/09/2020 and then re-ran on 14/09/2020 will retain its position amongst the other transactions processed on 02/09/2020.
The original journey execution that was rerunned will be labeled as Repeated emphasizing the execution was repeated a number of times.
The Connections window 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 window reflects a single active Gmail connection with a name, creation date, and option to switch the connected accounts or disconnect them permanently.
Any modifications that are incorporated in a journey gets saved 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 earlier versions of the journey by clicking on a specific version bar. The journey will open highlighting the trigger and action(s) configured:
Expand the Trigger and Steps statements to view the modifications incorporated in the input fields. If you want to restore this version, click the Restore button. The older version will become the current journey version will 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 will get disabled and you won't be able to restore it.
To move out of the Restore version window, click the Back to versions link at the top-left corner of the screen.
The Settings window lets you add a description, notes, keywords, etc. about the journey. Clicking on the Settings tab will open a window as shown here:
The text area has WYSIWYG functionality and supports the markdown feature. You can add text, format them; add pictures, codes, quotes, tables, and images. You can add a detailed note explaining the significance of your journey.
Clicking on the Preview button shows the HTML visualization of the description you have added.
