How is the hash/digest that's prepended to an exported Flow generated?

Shopify Flow
1

When a workflow is exported from Shopify Flow, the .flow output format is a JSON representation of the Workflow, prepended with a hash/digest and a colon, for example:

fd891682a57ccc33f2b77f4f31fc900f5507bbd8279acc227ee00974d52daed7:{"__metadata":{"version":0.1},"root":{ ... }}

Does anyone know how the hash/digest is being calculated? I’m assuming it’s some form of digest of the JSON body, but testing out standard digest algorithms like SHA256 doesn’t appear to result in the same hash being generated.

2

If you are trying to edit the file, don’t. Flow assumes a certain workflow structure and if you were to edit the file outside Flow and mess it up, it can cause problems for your shop and Flow. Also, it would be nearly impossible to debug.

3

I asked this same question to @paul_n back at last year’s Editions.dev :laughing:

I think we were probably playing around with the same idea, programmatic flow generation.

But it sounds like validation for 3rd party LLM/programmatically created flows would be a nightmare on Shopify Flow’s part.

4

One Q: What if you could feed variables into the workflow per shop and then set/control the workflow with the variables? Sort of like input variables to the “function” of the workflow?

5

Thanks for the quick reply, @paul_n!

I’m not really trying to edit the file completely programmatically (well, not that much), just trying to come up with a sane way to (a) version control flows and (b) provide an easy way to deploy the same Flows across multiple stores through some templating.

To do this, ideally I would like to store each flow in its own directory like this:

flows/
  my-special-flow/
    flow.json
    input.graphql
    output_schema.graphql
    script.js
  • flow.json: the JSON body of the flow, formatted for readability / diff tracking;
  • input.graphql: the GraphQL input schema for the Run Code action (assuming one exists, we also assume a single Run Code per flow for the moment);
  • output_schema.graphql: the GraphQL output schema for the Run Code action;
  • script.js: the Javascript for the Run Code action.

I would then have a build process that stitches these together into an importable flow for a specific merchant.

My assumption would be that workflows would be edited within the real Flow environment, but that we pull those changes back into our source repository so that we can track changes over time and have a source of truth for workflows that may be deployed across hundreds of stores.

Super ideally, the build process would support injecting environment variables into Flow steps (eg we have lots of workflows that push events into Klaviyo - would be great to be able to set the Klaviyo API key as an environment variable per merchant).

1 Like
6

@paul_n This would definitely make life easier and get some way close to what I’m hoping to achieve… bonus points if setting the environment for a workflow was programatically accessible :).

7

@paul_n any thoughts on the above? Is the digest/hash something that is feasible to calculate on our side?

8

No, we cannot support that on our side currently. Understand the need but not sure we would solve it by allowing edits to the .flow file.

I’m thinking through variables at the moment. You could potentially use a shop metafield now to control logic if you set that ahead of time and then checked it in Flow.

If the name matches across shops I think it would just work.

9

Fair enough.

Yeah, the other option I’ve been exploring / working with is storing configuration in meta objects or a shop metafield. Only thing there is that you expose it to other apps and it could contain sensitive information like API keys.

Gavin