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First steps

Introduction​

You already got an account and followed the steps up to the point where you're looking at an empty blueprint. What comes next?

UI elements​

Since the blueprint builder is the component where you'll be spending most of the time, it's a good idea to learn what the different UI parts are called.

  • Menu - Contains the UI's functionality exposed as commands that you can trigger.
  • Available actions - A list of all the actions that can be dragged to the canvas.
  • User-defined variables - Dynamic widget that shows the all the variables that have been declared in the blueprint.
  • Controls - Various buttons used to perform quick commands (save, undo, redo, zoom, etc...).
  • Minimap - Use it to orient yourself and navigate quickly to any part of your blueprint.
  • Log viewer - All actions that are performed by this tool will be logged here.

Creating a blueprint​

Creating a basic blueprint is as simple as choosing any action from the left sidebar and dragging it to the canvas. Actions should be connected either to other actions or directly to the "Start" action. If an action is not connected, either directly or indirectly, to the "Start" action, it won't be executed. Actions have settings, which allows us to modify how the action will behave when executed. For example, the sleep action will pause the execution for a certain amount of time (5 seconds by default), but we can change that by opening the settings of the action and changing the value.

Running blueprints​

Once you've finished creating a blueprint, you can save it and/or download it as a blueprint. Blueprints are regular JSON files containing all the actions that were placed in your blueprint. These files can be executed with the CLI companion.

You just created your first diagram, converted it to a blueprint and executed it with the CLI. Now that you're onboard with the basic stuff you probably have many questions. The following chapters will go into detail about how exactly actions work, what happens with errors, how the execution flow is defined, etc...

Enjoy the reading!