topic Recipe Documentation in Workato Pros Discussion Board

Recipe Documentation

brian-haskins — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:19:41 GMT

I need to document how recipes function in Workato into Confluence. Does anyone have any suggestions on how they handle the documentation on how their recipe works for external systems? This is done for groups who do not have access to Workato to view what happens in their Recipes or approval through a Change Board when we build out a new process.

The two thoughts I had was taking screenshots and putting them in the Confluence Article or using a Flow chart and copy and paste the comments through each step of the recipe.

Re: Recipe Documentation

johndpatton — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:25:42 GMT

If you do go that route you can use Page Properties Reports to track approvals, etc...

https://youtu.be/6HgirOyeWcQ

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/page-properties-report-macro-186089616.html

Re: Recipe Documentation

gfraser — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:26:09 GMT

Following this, as I would like to hear people's solutions/suggestions as well! Great Question.

Re: Recipe Documentation

jblanchett — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:32:46 GMT

I think "automated documentation" of recipes and how they work would be an amazing thing. You can get some basic documentation from the RecipeOps connector and Workato APIs (Trigger Type, Connections Involved, Folder Path, etc), but what's missing is the data mapping. It would be great if Workato could produce an automated document of the integration including the field mapping. "RDEs" or raw data element mapping is required in integration documentation for SOX. Producing these is surely one of the more brutally mundane tasks of all time.

Re: Recipe Documentation

krishna — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:37:33 GMT

totally agree this is a great question looking forward how other folks are doing this

Re: Recipe Documentation

michael-siegel — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 21:48:45 GMT

sorry to add to the followers count, but following. 🙂 great question!

Re: Recipe Documentation

jmcvicker — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 22:49:58 GMT

Following. I've been manually documenting in Confluence with screenshots & code snippets, but automating the documentation of an automation script feels like it _should_ be doable.

Re: Recipe Documentation

jyothilg — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 22:55:02 GMT

Self documenting within workato has been great , but agree extract the documentation for those without workato access would be very helpful. will check out the RecipeOps connector and Workato APIs and see if this satisfies the need.

Re: Recipe Documentation

steven-marissen — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 22:58:56 GMT

Personally I would not bother documenting recipes themselves too much. I would rather extract the process from that and put that into BPMN.

Because Workato has to tie into other applications's processes, which will tell you the whole story not just a part from it. Has the most value in my opinion, how the entire clock works.

Working event based also helps a lot, makes it easy to document what your input is (manatory, optional, format,...) and output.

Re: Recipe Documentation

brian-haskins — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 20:21:43 GMT

I did some digging and might be able to achieve something with the JSON of the export manifest with Recipe Lifecycle Management.

My thought was putting parsing out the JSON into a database (Snowflake) and then using some visualization around it. Not sure exactly how to achieve it fully but I think. Theres probably also a tool that would take the JSON and make a diagram out of it.

Re: Recipe Documentation

rachelnatik — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 21:44:41 GMT

Personally, i make heavy use of the comments feature on each step. Additionally, I use several sets of documentation. I'll use a spreadsheet to list out the systems and projects used by Workato, and then I also document recipes separately to detail their purpose and how they execute.