Context & Scripting

🚧

[BETA]

This product is currently in early access. Please reach out to your account manager to get more information.

Context

Workflow context captures the scope in which a workflow is run. Workflow context persists data between steps that you can read from or write to at runtime. Workflow context exposes two state variables data and step. data is where all workflow-level data is stored. step is where all the step-level data is stored. When the step has completed execution, step data is automatically cleared. So, if you want to capture data from a step to use at a later time, you need to save it to data. You can interact with the workflow context using the inputs and outputs in the step definitions.

Suppose you have a property in a step A called status which you want to use in a branch step later on. In order for the branch step to access this value, you need to output the value from step A to workflow context like

{
  "outputs": {
    "custom_status": "{{step.status}}"
  }
}

Now, your workflow data has a property named custom_status that you access from any other step like

{
  "selectNextStep": {
    "branchA": "{{data.custom_status == 'OK'}}",
    "branchB": null
  }
}

data can store complex objects. For example, a workflow triggered by an outbound message may have nested properties like

{
  "payload": {
    "status": {
      "code": 1001
    }
  }
}

and you can access this object in your workflow context like data.payload.status.code.

‎

Scripting

Automation service has rich support for scripting with JavaScript (currently supports ECMA 5.1) via input and output pipelines in the workflow context like member access operators (data.member, data['test']['key']), binary and tertiary operators like x == y ? 1 : 0; and the following functions we have defined for you.

• Check country code of a phone number using isCountryCode(phoneNumber, countryCode). For example, isCountryCode('+6512345678', 'SG') evaluates to true.

• Check if text contains a substring using stringContains(source,value,ignoreCase) For example, stringContains("hello, world","wor",true) evaluates to true. The ignoreCase param will ignore case-sensitivity is set to true. If ignoreCase is not set then the default is false which means it will be case-sensitive.

• Check if a timestamp falls within some time of the day for the specified time zone using isTimeOfDayBetween(timestamp, timeFrom, timeTo, timezone). For example, isTimeOfDayBetween('2020-10-15T14:40:15+07:00', ‘09:00:00', ‘18:00:00’, 'Singapore Standard Time’) evaluates to true. Refer to Time Zones resource for supported timezones.
  To check if a timestamp falls outside a specific time interval you can either specify it as two time intervals chained with an || (logical OR) condition or a negation ! (logical NOT) on a single time interval. For example, !isTimeOfDayBetween('2020-10-15T14:40:15+07:00', ‘09:00:00', ‘18:00:00’, 'Singapore Standard Time’) is logically equivalent to isTimeOfDayBetween('2020-10-15T14:40:15+07:00', ‘00:00:00', ‘08:59:59’, 'Singapore Standard Time’) || isTimeOfDayBetween('2020-10-15T14:40:15+07:00', ‘18:00:01', ‘23:59:59’, 'Singapore Standard Time’)
  

• Check the day of the week of a date using isDayOfWeek(date, day). For example, isDayOfWeek('2021-05-25', 'Tuesday') evaluates to true. The date can be a simple date or a full datetime in the ISO8601 format. Supported days are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. The days are not case sensitive. Any of Monday, monday, MONDAY is acceptable.

Scripts must be enclosed in double curly brackets like {{data.msisdn == 6500000000}}. The preceding statement will access the msisdn property from workflow context at runtime and check that it equals to 6500000000.

Following restrictions are placed on scripts for security reasons:

• Maximum length of scripts is 1000 characters.

• Assignments, allocations and type declarations are forbidden.

• Maximum number of statements allowed is set to 1 (configurable).

• Recursive functions are forbidden (configurable).

• Scripts that take more than 500 milliseconds to execute are forbidden (configurable).

‎