Classic Flow Overview
Classic flow is one of the workers we have available. It is perfect for prototyping out a chatbot experience, or providing short scripted process-based interactions. Weaving classic flow together with NLP workers and BaaS can also provide much more conversation design flexibility.
Flow Designer
To get to flow designer for a flow worker within a bot, there is a “Design” button on each Bot’s page.
Designer Canvas
After clicking the “Designer” button on a bot or worker, we open the Flow Designer Canvas. This is the area where you will drag and drop nodes in order to build out a bot end-to-end. When creating a new flow, it will first appear blank. Simply grab and drag the desired node(s) and place them on this canvas. As you develop your bot and connect more and more nodes, you will begin to see the flow that creates your bot on this canvas. You can move nodes around this canvas in order to better organize your flow and keep it easy to manage.
Node Palette
Down the left-hand side of this canvas is the Node Palette. Bots are built up of many nodes, which you can choose from here. To use these nodes, you must click on the node and drag it over to the canvas where you can see it drop onto. Once nodes are in place, you can double click on them to edit their properties, description, or appearance.
Flow Nodes
These blocks represent a step in the process a flow bot takes. ServisBOT has many classic flow nodes available for use to build logic into your conversations. Depending on the configuration, there might be more than one output.
Classic flow node library list
Managing Flows
Depending on the complexity or size of a bot, the canvas can become crowded with nodes, making it hard to understand and manage.
Found along the top of the canvas to the right, there is + icon that will create different tabs with a new canvas, select the + icon in the top left-hand corner.
All of these flows stay within one bot, but enables you to separate your flow based on the functions or phases you build for the bot’s flow. You can rename these tabs to highlight what this flow is for. See “Know your Nodes (Basic)” and “Links” to see how you can connect these different tabs so that the bot knows when to move onto the next flow.