Flow Feature Requests | Bulk Delete, Copy Paste, Bulk Copy Paste, App Sequences and Branches

Hey @paul_n and team, just wanted to share a couple of feature requests that would make our lives 10x better when building Flows for merchants ever day.

1. Click and Drag Selection: LOVE that you can click and drag to select multiple nodes using SHIFT. We just found this.

The user experience is a little janky though as we always get a blank white sidebar upon selection:

Video: Screen capture - 81e86602546881432795cf807b884bbd - Gyazo

Also note, it’s super sensitive and often releases to early when you are part way through the click and drag action. It feels like it is fighting with the sidebar?

1.1. Bulk delete: Once clicking and dragging, it would be INCREDIBLE if we could bulk delete the selected nodes. Our use case is we have a master flow we use for our merchants but they don’t always need every branch of the flow. Would love to be able to delete unrequired branches easily. We often build these for merchants on onboarding calls and it is a bit painful an inefficient to delete all of these nodes one at a time.

1.2 Copy and Paste+ Bulk Copy/Paste: We’d LOVE to be able to copy and paste nodes - ideally bulk selected nodes too. Sometimes we just need to add a conditions or sequences to multiple branches. This feature would be a huge time saver too.

2. Saved sequences: Instead of having templates that show up in Flow’s template library, we’d love t be able to have ‘branches’ that are selectable when our app is installed. With a single click, a pre-saved sequence or branch would be added to the flow canvas and fully selected so the user could drag it to where they want it. Examples would be our core master flow, a branch for inventory/overselling protection, a branch for if they have subscriptions on their store, a branch for if they have bundles on their store etc etc

We’d also be super keen to make sure that updates to these branch templates can be updated as quickly as it takes for our app to update i.e. no 5 day review delay. Have asked separately this as I’m hearing about the delay second hand.

Hey @paulygoldston!

Thanks for the notes, much appreciated and always nice to run into you virtually :slight_smile:

Here’s some notes on the items you raised:

1. Click and Drag Selection: LOVE that you can click and drag to select multiple nodes using SHIFT. We just found this.

The user experience is a little janky though as we always get a blank white sidebar upon selection

We have work in flight to update some of the canvas interactions and this experience is part of what we’re improving. I just tried it out on a dev branch and it’s working more like what you’d expect, so look forward to that soon!

Also, you can shift+click to select multiple steps on top of using the bounding box.

1.1. Bulk delete: Once clicking and dragging, it would be INCREDIBLE if we could bulk delete the selected nodes. Our use case is we have a master flow we use for our merchants but they don’t always need every branch of the flow. Would love to be able to delete unrequired branches easily. We often build these for merchants on onboarding calls and it is a bit painful an inefficient to delete all of these nodes one at a time.

Bulk delete is possible today using the delete button in the action bar at the bottom of the page. See the attached screenshot.

1.2 Copy and Paste+ Bulk Copy/Paste: We’d LOVE to be able to copy and paste nodes - ideally bulk selected nodes too. Sometimes we just need to add a conditions or sequences to multiple branches. This feature would be a huge time saver too.

This is great feedback and is something on our radar, but not something we’ve implemented yet.

2. Saved sequences: Instead of having templates that show up in Flow’s template library, we’d love t be able to have ‘branches’ that are selectable when our app is installed. With a single click, a pre-saved sequence or branch would be added to the flow canvas and fully selected so the user could drag it to where they want it. Examples would be our core master flow, a branch for inventory/overselling protection, a branch for if they have subscriptions on their store, a branch for if they have bundles on their store etc etc

This is another one that’s very much on our radar and we’re excited to look at but nothing I can share yet on timeline or availability. Being able to reuse sequences of steps would be a big time saver.

We’d also be super keen to make sure that updates to these branch templates can be updated as quickly as it takes for our app to update i.e. no 5 day review delay. Have asked separately this as I’m hearing about the delay second hand.

Can you elaborate on this one? Are you thinking about them like a regular Template review?

Thanks again for the feedback, Paul!!

@Dave_McV !!! How good! So awesome to see you from the other side of the fence man :raised_hands:

Thanks a million for these responses.

  1. SO awesome to hear re canvas interaction experience updates. I got to test the new search module this week too and it is :ok_hand: :ok_hand: :ok_hand:

  2. OH MY GOSH THE BULK DELETE! This is amazing. Can’t believe I didn’t know about this! Thanks so much. This is going to be a big time saver for us.

One tiny bit of feedback is that the popup warning pre-delete doesn’t pluarise if multiple nodes are selected:

Maybe should say ‘Deleting these steps cannot be undone’ when multiple selected? :+1:

  1. RE: copy/paste/bulk copy paste: Awesome to hear it’s on the radar :green_heart:

  2. Saved sequences: Also AWESOME to hear this is also on the radar! If you ever need testers please let us know. We are using Flow heavily every single day :raised_hands:

  3. My CTO @keiraarts mentioned that when you include a Flow template in your app, it takes 5 days for app changes to take effect as it is limited by the time it takes to review the Flow (even if no changes are made to the Flow template in the update). Is this accurate? My question here was, if you do move towards allowing apps to provide ‘saved sequences’ to merchants, to not put these restrictions on them (as we deploy multiple times daily). But let me know if we are wrong here.

So great to hear from you man. Hope you and the family are well!!