Today marks the first release of Flows: centralized, server-side logic and integrations you build once and call from any app in your Solution. It’s been a highly requested feature, and is now available behind a feature flag in the Early release channel.
Get in touch to have it enabled on your solution!
What you can do at launch
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Create a Flow from scratch, or by uploading an OpenAPI specification. Provide a spec for an external API, choose the endpoints you want, and Appfarm will scaffold the actions for you.
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Integrate with other Appfarm Solutions more easily. Flows makes it simpler to set up integrations with endpoints in other Solutions you have access to.
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Run Flows from your apps. Any app action can call a Flow, so your shared logic lives in one place.
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Use schemas to handle data from web requests. Schemas make it easier to process data coming back from an API, with less manual mapping than a data source.
Three new concepts worth getting familiar with
These are new building blocks in the platform. The documentation is worth a read before you start building:
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Action variables — runtime variables for handling data inside an action, available in both Flows and Apps. You can use these, for example, to store an iterator value while looping through data, relying less on App Variables. Read the docs
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Action data sources — runtime data sources scoped to a single action. They can hold instances of object classes, enums, or calendar objects. You can keep them private to the action or return them from it. Read the docs
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Schemas — structured definitions for data moving in and out of web requests. Compared to a data source, schemas give you a simpler way to process what a web request returns, with less manual mapping. Read the docs
On the roadmap
We’re not stopping here. There’s much more to come:
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Build Flows with Appfarm AI.
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Run Flows on a schedule, or trigger them from external systems over API endpoints. Similar to how Services work today.
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Build MCP servers. Create a Flow as an MCP server, connect it to Claude or another AI client, and chat with your data through governed tools.
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Download prebuilt integrations from Farmer’s Market, starting with some of the most popular services.
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Streaming Web Request for real-time AI responses in your apps.
Why this release matters
You can already share logic across apps with Services. Flows is a cleaner way to do it: purpose-built for building integrations, with schemas for handling data from web requests, and reusability that extends across Solutions. It’s the same governed, visual approach you use elsewhere in Appfarm, now applied to the server-side work that connects your apps.
Where to start
- Flows documentation
- Get in touch to have Flows enabled if your are on the Early release channel