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Solution home Recipe 101 General Best Practices

Building your recipe iteratively

Created by: Allan Teng from Workato

Modified on: Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 6:05 PM

Building your recipe iteratively

When attempting to build a rather complicated recipe, we recommend building it iteratively, or go by phases Here are a few tips:

1. Make sure your trigger works as expected

Things to check when using a trigger :

    1.  Should you be using trigger filters?
    2. Is the Since parameter correct? 
    3. Should it be based on created/updated, or just created?

    I start the recipe with nothing but the trigger followed by a clock action. The clock action is just a dummy action. When I test this recipe, it will get a current time. This way, I can check whether the tested output is the desired result that I wish. I am able to do all this without updating records in any of my connected apps. See article on debugging or troubleshooting recipes


    2. Check your conditional actions

    You can now add a few more steps to make sure which condition would be the best choice, I use clock, email, or Slack in place of the real actions to capture the data mappings that will eventually be there..The reason for adding these notification steps here is that conditional steps do not show up in the log, hence we need to add different actions for different conditions to know if the conditions are correct



    Best if you have both sides to know which is the better course to take.


    3. Pay Attention to indentation

    Make sure that your actions are all nested correctly. For Conditional actions and repeated actions, actions that you want to be processed under those criteria have to be nested under the first action. If an action is supposed to be activated under a certain condition, make sure that it is nested under the same scope. If it isn't, it will be processed regardless of the condition.


    This is wrong because Step 2 is not indented. Note how Step 4 is on a different level from the rest.

     Step 4 is indented under Step 3.

    To learn more about indentation, check out this link here.


    4. Cloning and Version Control

    I use cloning and modifying to create the next version of the recipe. Cloning recipe allows me to push changes to the original recipe whenever I want to. This allows you to create a "test" and "production" recipes. The cloned recipe will be a production recipe, and you can make changes on the original/test recipe. 




    When you edit the original recipe, the cloned recipe will show that changes are available to be pushed.


    Simply click on install to copy the changes from test recipe to production recipe


    Once you are satisfied with the changes, going to the cloned recipe, you should be able to see a note that a new version is available. This allows you to push any changes made on the test recipe to the production recipe.

    If you make a mistake and want to revert to a previous recipe version, check out this article here.


    5. Cleaning up

    I keep iteratively building up the recipe, until I get to my perfect recipe. After I am done, I go and cleanup all the temporary recipes I had built that I don't need any more. To delete, you click on the Delete Button underneath the 'Start Recipe' Button.


    6. Try out the new recipe. 

    At this point will connect to the production system by changing the App connection to point to the production app. I will try out the recipe by changing the since parameter to a very short interval, and add a new record and test it out. I may do this step iteratively too, by updating  the test system first and then change the connections to make the updates to the production system.

    The final step is to make a copy of the recipe and change the since parameter to the right interval. You will need to make a copy of the recipe as changing the since parameter to an earlier time does not trigger the recipe to go back before the latest trigger than was made. You may also need to change the connections to your production systems.

    Click on start to start the recipe. You are done. If there are any errors you will be notified by email. 


    7. Monitor 

    If you want to you can monitor the recipe periodically to see if there are any errors that you had not taken care of. You can do this on the 'My recipes page' that shows the active recipes and the failed and successful job counts.



    Have a suggestion on how to use Workato better? Post them on our forums here!


    A
    Allan is the author of this solution article.

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