Check steps and flow

[uwegeercken]

Problem description

The developer needs a way of checking individual steps or the complete flow. As typically names for fields, variables, files, functions and other parts change during development, the developer today only detects an error when the flow runs.

Flows can have long runtimes and it is not productive and efficient to detect errors only when the flow runs. It should be as error-free as possible before it is run.

Preferred solution

Add functionality to check the flow. When the user selects this feature, the flow and all steps are checked as appropriate. One could maybe also configure the flow to always check before it runs.

• check variable references
• check field references
• check file path and name references
• check spelling in content where possible: evaluate functions, dicts, lists
• check suspicious settings like e.g. no output hop but two error hops
• check absence of mandatory information
• check missing or invalid connections between steps
• others

Some results are typically errors which prohibit the flow from running. Others are more like warnings where the flow does run but a change would be recommended or the settings are at least suspicious or something e.g. is deprecated.

[uwegeercken]

as discussed, additionally check the presence of modules which are referenced in the flow. this should also check if variables, services referenced from modules are present.

[uwegeercken]

there could (maybe) be an option in the run dialog to check the flow before running it. but this is just an idea.