Working with flow links

What flow links are

Flow links are a special type of node that allows you to connect flows together. By using flow links, a conversation can start in one flow and then move to another flow.

When a conversation advances to a flow link node, it moves to the the linked flow, starting with its start node. All form data and the conversation transcript so far are maintained, so you don't lose any information and you can see the user's full path through all linked flows they visit.

In analytics, the conversation will be associated with the last flow visited.

Why you might use a flow link

There are many use cases enabled by flow links. Here are a few examples.

Product or use case selector

Flow links allow you to create a "global" flow in which users can indicate their product or their use case and then be taken to a more-specific flow.

For example, suppose you have a flow for FAQs, one for product troubleshooting, and one for finding spare parts. You could create a global flow in which the user can indicate which of these they need and then go through a flow link to the relevant specific flow.

You could then embed different flows in different parts of your website. You could embed the FAQ flow in the FAQ section of your site, the troubleshooting flow in the support section, and the parts finder in the parts list section, and then embed the global flow on all other pages.

You could even have multiple different global flows that you show to different markets or different user categories, presenting different sets of product or use case options.

Targeted search

Search nodes search over all nodes in the current flow (including any components). If you want to give your users the ability to search on a specific set of information, you can put that information and a corresponding search node in its own dedicated flow and connect to it with a flow link.

This way, no information for other products or use cases will be returned for the search.

Global flags

Because form data is maintained across flow links, any data you set in the starting flow will be available even if the conversation follows a flow link to another flow.

If your flow makes use of any information that changes periodically, you could set it in the "global" flow with write data nodes before using any flow links.

When this information changes, you can update it in one place and only need to publish one changed flow, no matter how many other flows it links to.