# Custom Code Component Interface & IDE

**URL:** <https://community.hubspot.com/t/custom-code-component-interface-ide/63871>\
**Category:** HubSpot Ideas\
**Tags:** integrations, workflows\
**Created:** [August 26, 2022, 9:07pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/custom-code-component-interface-ide/63871 "2022-08-26T21:07:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Xavier-Plum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/a4c791/32.png) [@Xavier-Plum](https://community.hubspot.com/u/Xavier-Plum)\
**Post date:** [August 26, 2022, 9:07pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/custom-code-component-interface-ide/63871/1 "2022-08-26T21:07:43Z")

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Hello!

Our company just deep dived into Hubspot and we found that, like many UI Tools, visual programming workflows were not powerful enough for our customer journeys : not possible to perform complex join on entities, no property comparison function, no dynamic date, etc.

Therefore, we (Tech Team) started to build many Custom Code Python-blocks to be used by the marketing team within workflows.

It works pretty well so far but I faced huge caveats that could be easily fixed to leverage developper experience.

- The UI ‘coding’ interface is not serious. It is impossible to code a block more than 20 lines long with this interface, it lacks all the basic features of a 2022 IDE. Even Full Screen, you cannot see anything.

- Quick win - easy to implement : could we **name custom code blocks** so workflow users would figure out immediately what is the purpose of a block. Right now our workflows ended up being a block ‘custom code’ connected to another ‘custom code’ splitting in branches connected to many other ‘custom code blocks’. Not really friendly 😞

- Quick win - on the same topic : could we **get a visible _description_ field on the block itself ?** Comments do not work well for that purpose

- Medium Difficulty : could we get a **centralized** custom code management? One custom code block can be re-used over and over (copy/pasted), so when the code is updated, it shall be replaced everywhere in every workflow. It is a nightmare to maintain. At least centralized **per** workflow would be good enough.

- Tough one : could we get a proper connection to an external IDE ? With one click code publishing updating all components within workflows? Righ now we have to copy-paste the code into each components.

Hubspot is a great tool and API are working well, I think that a better bridge between workflows and code would leverage a lot what can be done with the tool.

Thanks!

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Xavier-Plum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/a4c791/32.png) [@Xavier-Plum](https://community.hubspot.com/u/Xavier-Plum)\
**Post date:** [January 23, 2024, 2:57pm UTC](https://community.hubspot.com/t/custom-code-component-interface-ide/63871/2 "2024-01-23T14:57:50Z")

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Without any answer in a year, and problems still unfixed, we decided to move the whole logic to a Python microservice connected to the workflow, and calling back Hubspot for business purposes (like sending emails, adding to a list, reporting, etc.)

Workflows are only used to call this microservice, w/o taking any decision.

It’s a clear product failure for complex cases 😞