Introducing Workflows and a New Starter 🌱 Edition in SaasRock v0.9.2

4 min readNov 27, 2023

Hey there! With SaasRock Workflows in the fresh v0.9.2 release, tackling complex tasks just got a whole lot easier with no-code. Also, a new Starter edition has been released!

TLDR: Watch a 1-min demo.

Summarizing the v0.9.2 release:

Workflows Feature 🎉: in all editions, plus open source
New SaasRock Starter 🌱 Edition at $149 one-time (no updates)
Black Friday Deal (Nov 27th — Dec 3rd): Use the coupon BF2023 for -40%

SaasRock v0.9.2 — Workflow Builder + Starter Edition

Why is this not v1.0 yet? Help Desk and Affiliates are the 2 missing features. But in order to build Help Desk, I needed to build a workflow engine first.

Concepts

Blocks: Triggers and Actions.
Variables and Credentials: Global variables and encrypted credentials.
Executions: A single run of a Workflow.
Workflow Context: Inputs and Outputs within a workflow execution.

Execution Modes

Choose between different modes for triggering a workflow:

Manual: Manually trigger a Workflow.
API 🪨: Use the API to trigger a Workflow @ /api/workflows/run/$id.
Stream 🚀: Get updates from a stream (chat-like).

Tenants/Accounts can also create and run their own Workflows 🪨.

Workflow Features

There are 4 workflows editions:

Open source: remix-workflows
SaasRock Starter 🌱: $149 one-time + no updates
SaasRock Core 🪨: $1,399/y + updates
SaasRock Enterprise 🚀: $2,099/y + updates

See the full feature comparison in the following table.

Workflow Blocks

Triggers

Manual: By clicking a button
Row Event 🚀: created, updated, deleted

Actions

IF: True and False paths
HTTP Request: Set method, URL, Body, and Headers
Log: Logs to the system
Alert User: Sends alert to current user
Switch 🪨: Default, case1, case2… etc, paths
Iterator 🪨: For loop using a variable
Variable 🪨: Set a context variable
Wait for Input 🚀: Waits for user input (support in Manual, API, and streaming)
GPT Chat Completion 🚀: Call OpenAI API
Row Get 🚀: Create an entity row
Row Create 🚀: Create an entity row
Row Update 🚀: Update an entity row
Row Delete 🚀: Delete an entity row

Plus, on the Enterprise Edition 🚀, I’ll work on (long-term):

Crons support (Sleep, Delayed until…)
Send Emails
Global workflows (create a workflow in the admin dashboard for all tenants)
Advanced Workflow Analytics (i.e. percentages paths in a funnel)

Variables and Credentials

Variables

Sometimes it’s useful to have a global state. For example, you may have multiple GPT blocks across many workflows, and if there’s a new model released, you could create a variable {{$vars.gptModel}}.

Credentials

In the case of credentials 🚀, the only difference between them is that they’re encrypted before storing and decrypted before using it, click here to see the method.

Workflow Context

A workflow execution will always have an output similar to this:

{
  "$params": {},
  "$session": {
    "tenant": {},
    "user": {},
  },
  "$vars": {},
  ...blocksOutputs
}

Explanation:

$params: Every execution starts with a JSON input
$session.tenant: If the execution is on the admin side, it’s null
$session.user: If the execution is not started manually by a user, it’s null
$vars: Global variables are injected

Finally, each executed block will have a value with the block name. For example, the following output is from the “GPT Simulator” workflow template.

{
  "$params": {},
  "$session": { "tenant": null, "user": null },
  "$vars": {
    "gptModel": "gpt-3.5-turbo"
  },
  "waitForInput": {
    "input": "Hi"
  },
  "if": {
    "condition": false,
    "expression": "{{waitForInput.input}} Equals bye"
  },
  "gpt": {
    "result": "Hello! How can I assist you today?"
  }
}

Using Variables

Since the workflow context has everything you need from the workflow execution, you now can access values from previous blocks. Using the previous example:

{{gpt.result}} will be “Hello! How can I assist you today?”
{{$session.tenant}} will be an empty string
{{$credentials.OPENAI_API_KEY}} will decrypt the value on the fly and destroy it

This is possible thanks to Handlebars.js.

Workflow Templates

I created a few templates that use every supported block, some of them are Core and/or Enteprise-only.

Input Examples

While building and testing your workflows, it’s useful to set a few input examples instead of having to type the input body every time. For example:

Existing item: The input is { id: 10 }, so you know the workflow must go through the success path
ID parameter not provided: This tests that the initial execution (manually, via the API, or in streaming mode) is sent correctly.

And so on.

Input Validation

The Manual Trigger has a special “validation” field that receives a JSON configuration. This validates the schema using Ajv JSON schema validator:

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "id": {
      "type": "number"
    }
  },
  "required": [
    "id"
  ]
}

You can create any necessary validation schema to ensure the correct execution of a workflow.

I hope you’re as excited as I am for workflows!

Let me know what you think on the Discord server or subscribe to my newsletter to get notified on new saasrock features.