It'd be great to be able to get Workflows visualized outside of HubSpot in a flow tool like Lucid or Google Draw. Here are a few reasons:
Workflow documentation. This would allow for a workflow to be visualized and commented on. This would be especially useful for more complex workflows. Especially if you are handing them off to another person when you hire or leave a company. This way, the visual could also be piped/integrated into platforms like Confluence.
Proposing updates. This could feasibly be done by just cloning a workflow and making proposed updates without ever making it active. But you wouldn't be able to comment on any of the proposed updates inline.
Exporting Workflows as visuals. You can export workflows as a CSV from within the portal, but this gives limited information about it. You could also take a screenshot, but this doesn't work great if you have a large workflow (you can only zoom out so far and take a good resolution screenshot). Having the ability to load workflows into Lucid makes them more portable.
The HubAPI already has the ability to dump the JSON structure of a Workflow. I'm sure the JSON structure could be used to easily visualize a workflow outside of HubSpot. Someone would just need to put in the time to map it out and generate the visual.
We are researching all of these features actively and will update as soon as we make progress! In particular, we're beginning work on a "commenting" feature that would allow adding action level (and soon workflow level) comments. We also are looking into whether an "export to JPEG" and an "export to Lucid Chart" feature could be implemented given our product's limitations!
What would also help already would be the ability to:
Create folders within folders (e.g. this would allow us to create subgroups for all Leadnurturing WFs based on certain criteria rather than using a naming convention to do this). I feel like that would be an easy thing to implement.
Visualize not only workflows, but also their dependencies! I think this is a big topic for us atm. It would be really nice if HS provided a way to see which workflows interact, when they trigger usually, and what other workflows (or properties) they depend on. I don't have a suggestion as to what that could look like but that would definitely be a game changer.
@zeke the newer export to PNG is great, but still limited.
The ability to create something dynamic that can be edited in a 3rd party like LucidChart or Google Draw or Gliffy would be ideal.
LucidChart, or something similar would just need instructions on how to read the JSON structure from the Workflows API endpoint to recreate the appropriate visual.
Again, the PNG export is a good start, but I'm not sure I'm ready to call this 'done'.
@ryker I agree that the feature isn't done! We have been looking at exportable versions of a workflow, specifically exporting to LucidChart CSV format (they have a specific format that would allow easily importing into LucidChart).
One of the main challenges with having a direct API for this is that the Workflows tool displays an abundant amount of information from all over HubSpot. We accomplish this within the app by stitching together dozens and sometimes hundreds of data points from virtually every product HubSpot has to offer. This makes it a complex task to export the data for these 3rd party tools so while not impossible, it's daunting.
Given all the other features we have lined up for our tool, we're likely not going to get to this in the short term. However, we're moving towards a world where our code can more efficiently provide this information, at which point we'll be able to take on this feature!
@zeke - Is there any discussion about continuing with a Lucid API just for properties so that we can easily keep track of an ever evolving company ERD?
