Published OData Microflow

Introduction

As of Mendix 10.2.0, Studio Pro allows you to publish microflows as part of an OData service. A published microflow becomes an external action which can be called by an application consuming this service. This allows you to model and publish operations that are more complex than straightforward create, read, update, and delete operations on a single entity.

Adding or Editing a Published Microflow

Add a Microflow

Open your published OData service or create a new one.

In the Microflows tab of the published OData service, click Add. This opens a selector dialog box where you can select the microflow you want to publish. You can also click New to create a new microflow.

Click Select to add the microflow with the microflow name as its default Exposed name. If you want to change this and add documentation, edit the published microflow.

Another way of publishing a microflow is from the microflow itself. You can do one of the following:

• Right-click the canvas and select Publish as OData action
• Drag the microflow from the Connector pane onto the Microflows grid within the published OData service’s Microflows tab

When you publish a microflow that has object, list, enumeration parameters, or return types, these entities and enumerations must also be published. To enable consumers of your service to send or retrieve associated objects, you must publish these associations and the associated entities as well.

Edit a Published Microflow

Either select the microflow and click Edit, or double-click the microflow to open its properties. In the Edit published microflow dialog box, you can change the Exposed name and the Microflow.

Below that, in the Example of location field, you can find the URI where the action will be located when the app is running.

You can also choose to specify an Alternative name (in URL). This name will be use in the OpenAPI document of the service. If you specify an alternative name, the microflow will be available on two different URLs: one that uses the exposed name, and one that uses the alternative name. Use an alternative name when you require the microflow to be available on a URL that would be invalid in OData but valid in OpenAPI, such as my-first-microflow.

In the Public documentation tab, you can add a short Summary and a longer Description to describe the behavior of the action.

Return Type

This shows the return type of the published microflow.

Editing Published Microflow Parameters

Add a Parameter

When you publish a microflow for the first time, the current microflow parameters are added to the Parameters for microflow grid of the published microflow.

You can Add or Delete parameters from the published microflow.

Edit a Parameter

To edit a published parameter, either select the parameter and click Edit or double-click the parameter. The Edit published microflow parameter dialog box lets you edit the Exposed name of the published parameter.

You can also select Can be empty. If this checkbox is cleared, calls to the published microflow will fail unless the parameter is provided.

4 Customizing the Outgoing HTTP Response

It is possible to manipulate the response, which is produced as a result of an OData Action call. To do this, the published microflow must have a parameter with a System.HttpResponse type.

• If no changes were made to HttpResponse object, the actual response will not change.
• If only headers of the HttpResponse were changed (for instance, a new header was added to the response), those headers are merged with default headers, which replaces values of the same name.
• If the status code or content of the HttpResponse is changed, the actual response is produced exclusively from the HttpResponse parameter, including status code, headers, and response body.
• The ReasonPhrase field is ignored.
• It is not possible to change values for Transfer-Encoding and Date headers.
• When the status code is set to 204, an empty response body is always produced.