Working with units

Units are the core of a Flow and can be added to the canvas by dragging them from the Units Panel at the left area of the window. As said before, a Flow is composed of at least 2 units properly configured and linked. There are several actions that you can perform with units to edit them and create a Flow that matches your needs.

Move units

Units can be easily moved and placed in the required location, no matter if they are linked to other units or not. To do it, just click the unit, hold the mouse button, and drag the unit to the required placed.

Open

You can also move several units at once. To do it, click a unit, then hold the CTRL key and click the rest of units you want to move. You will see a selection frame that indicates the number of units selected. Then, drag the selection area to the required place.

Open

Remove units from your Flow

To remove a unit from your Flow, click it to open its menu. Select the options icon in the middle and then click the X icon.

The unit will be removed from the Flow along with all its incoming and outgoing links with other units. Alternatively, you can select it and hit the DELETE key.

If you want to remove several units at the same time, hold the CTRL key and click the units you want to delete, then hit the DELETE key.

Clone units

To clone a unit in your Flow, click it to open its menu. Select the options icon in the middle and then click the clone icon.

The unit will be cloned and will keep the same properties and configuration options of the original unit. Alternatively, you can select a unit and click CTRL + C to copy it, and then CTRL + V to paste it in the canvas.

If you want to clone several units at the same time, hold the CTRL key and click the units you want to clone. Then, click CTRL + C to copy them and CTRL + V to paste the clones in the canvas.

Remove all the links of a unit

You can delete all the incoming and outgoing links of a unit in your Flow. To do it, click the required unit to open its menu. Select the options icon in the middle and then click the scissors icon.

Check the events going through a unit

Click a unit to open its menu and select the magnifying glass icon to open the Events window at the bottom area. A tab will be opened showing the events generated, processed, or received by the selected unit. Learn more about the Events window here.

Check the events going through a unit port

If you hover the mouse over a unit port, you will see the fields and corresponding types of the events it receives or sends. You can click the magnifying icon that appears next to the fields table to open the events window at the bottom area and check the events that go through that port. Learn more about the Events window here.

You can also hover over a specific field name in the table to see the unit that generated that column, and the links it went through. The corresponding units and links will be highlighted in blue.

In the following picture, we hovered over the sha_256 field going through one of the output ports of the JSONparser unit. We can see that the unit that generated this field was the first one, and the path it followed to arrive at the selected unit.

Create groups of units

In Flows with many different units, understanding the behavior of different parts of the Flow or working with a specific set of units may become a difficult task. To avoid this, you can select different sets of units and define groups.

To do it, click a unit, hold the CTRL key and click the rest of the units you want to include in the group. Then click the icon that appears to define the group. A line will mark the selected units to set them apart from the rest. 

You can define as many groups as required, and give each of them a different name, description and color. To do it, double-click its name tag (groups are named group1, group2, etc by default), choose the required name, description and color and click Apply. The name will be shown in the group tag and both the tag and the line of the group will be displayed in the selected color.

You can also move individual units within a group, or select various whilst holding the CTRL key and move them as required:

Alternatively, use the Fit to group button to adjust the position to fit the group size:

Finally, you can ungroup units and delete all the units in a group using the options in the menu that appears when you click a group name. Besides, you can manually set the size of a group line after clicking the name of the group.