Message box actions
Message boxes enable real-time interaction between users and flows. Message boxes actions can be used to both provide input to flows and provide output to the users.
Output actions
To examine how the output message boxes function, replicate the following flow that extracts data from an Excel file and populates it into a web portal.
Note
The Populate_Web_Form subflow should contain all the functionality to populate the Excel data into the web portal. For this example, you can use any web portal for which you have access rights.
Depending on the data size and the processing steps for each entry, the flow might take significant time to complete. When the flow is finished, add a message box to inform the user that the flow is finished successfully and display the number of claims processed.
In the following screenshot, you can examine how the Display message action affects what the user sees when the flow runs successfully.
Input actions
The second function of message boxes actions is enabling users to provide input to the flow.
User input might come in many forms, such as text, datetime, files, and folders, etc. Each of these input types corresponds to a different message box action.
As an example, examine the following flow that requires a file path and a multi-line text as input from the user and appends the text input to the file.
The following Display select file dialog action displays a dialog for the user to select a .txt file.
The Display input dialog action is configured to receive a multi-line text as input.
In the following screenshot, you can see the dialog produced by the Display input dialog action.
The Display select from list dialog action allows users to select one or more items from a pre-configured list. The action also allows for empty selections.
Custom forms
As presented in the previous sections, you can use the input and output message boxes for scenarios where a single input or output is required, respectively.
However, some automation scenarios might require a combination of multiple inputs or/and outputs. The best approach to implement this functionality is creating a custom form.
To create a custom form, deploy the Display custom form action and press the Custom form designer button to open the form designer.
The designer provides various input elements, such as text, date, and file inputs, and some non-interactive elements, such as texts and images.
All input elements are identified by a unique ID that you can use to access the provided data later in your flow. The data are stored in the CustomFormData custom object variable, and you can use the following notation to access them: %CustomFormData['ElementID']%.
Apart from these elements, the custom form designer provides actions that enable you to implement more functionality to your form.
The submit action allows you to gather the data provided by the user or use it as a cancel button. When an action is pressed, its unique ID is saved into the ButtonPressed variable. If your form contains many actions, use this variable and conditionals to implement different flow behavior for each scenario.
