ODA – Migrate your YAML to the Visual Flow Designer

The 22.06 ODA release gave us the possibility to migrate the older dialog 1.0 with yaml, to the new dialog 2.0 that uses the visual flow designer.

I will try this in a custom HCM Skill, with plenty of regular and answer intents. It does make a good candidate to test the yaml – to – visual flow migration capability.

If you are on version 22.06, you will have the “Migrate to Flow Designer” button enabled on the top right.

Once you press it, give it a new name, or leave it as default.

Some notes to keep in mind

  • Check for validation errors upfront, otherwise there may be migration errors
  • The migration only works for YAML with less than 50 states.
  • It will migrate to one Visual Flow
  • It will require a post migration effort to split that one Visual Flow into the proper individual flows

The Validation menu has been extended with Migration information, and provides plenty of info.

The new Skill

When you open the newly created Skill, in the same Dialog option, you will find one flow containing all of the migrated states. In this case, I had one YAML called HCM, and that is the only flow present here.

Note that all the different Intents were identified and are mapped to the same flow.

How can we easily split it?

Fortunately with 22.06 came the option to copy and paste parts of the dialog flow.

This is how the entire HCM flow looks like.

I can zoom into the Greeting (a separate intent) and copy that part of the dialog into a new Flow!!

and then name the new flow (or choose an existing one)

and now for a bigger intent (CreateAbsence)

Then we need to change the mappings in the main flow, and potentially do some cleaning in the newly created flows. The cleaner the yaml originally was, with proper defined actions and transitions, the cleaner the migration will be. I also add to remove some end states that were not necessary, but the core logic remained solid and we can visually see how the visual flow designer works with its modules.