Flow-Like Alpha v0.0.8 — The UI Building and BI Release

UI Builder

• Dashboard Elements
• Custom Layouts
• Interactive Components
• FlowPilot for UI Generation
• Update, Delete & Create new UI Elements from your workflow - versioned together

Sharable Widgets for reuse and the nodes to control the frontend

Business Intelligence (BI) Features

• Data Viz through dashboard building
• Integration of a robust DataFusion integration on node level
  • Let’s you query your lancedb tables (database default implementation)
  • Ingest new data
  • Use Parquet ingest (time based aggregations, filters, etc)
  • Connection of Postgres, MySQL, and other databases through DataFusion connectors (ODBC, FlightSQL, etc) -> SnowFlake etc should also be supported
  • Athena Integration
  • S3 based data lake querying (Iceberg, Delta Lake, etc)
  • And more…
• Agent compatible, just hook one or multiple Sources into a DataFusion session and add the session to the agent

WASM Nodes

• Rust and AssemblyScript templates for building custom WASM nodes
• Expanded node catalog with new functionalities without adjusting the source code -> Very early stage, expect better documentation and functionality next release

Runtime Variables

• You can now user specific runtime variables. E.g your workflow execution requires a custom user API key -> define and let user set it at runtime (stored only local, never shared with backend)

Node Updates

• Open Database now supports user scoped databases (secure by design)
• Improved Document Extraction + summarization options -> source for this is open source here: https://github.com/TM9657/markitdown-rs
• New Web Nodes (standard Headers)
• New Default Node (Checks for value, if invalid -> use default value pin)
• Create QR Code Node
• Remove field from Struct Node
• Faker Nodes: For mocking data efficiently
• Geo Location Nodes: Want to get an image of certain coordinates or use the same coordination system as Uber? Now you can with our Geo Location Nodes (H3, Geocoding, etc)

Notification System

• In-App Notifications for workflow executions, system updates, errors, and more
• Configurable notification settings -> Notify yourself when something in the background workflow happens / Notify a specific team member when something happens (has to be part of the project)

Clear Board Execution settings

• You can now define where the workflow runs (locally, remote or hybrid)
• This change also introduces local only nodes which would force execution locally (e.g. Computer and Browser Use, File System Nodes, etc)
• If you run a shared workflow containing secret variables locally, you will be prompted to enter the secret too. The backend never returns the secret to the frontend for security reasons.

Some UI and UX Improvements

• Improved project creation, removed the old way of doing that.
• Faster navigation through quick search / spotlight
• More information about current execution
• In workflows you can quickly create variables from pins (carrying over their schema for schema save variable handling)
• Make and Break struct based nodes if they have a pin. No need to manually set the field with x nodes, just one make and break.

Documentation updates & code base changes

• New docs for our new features
• Frontend for the desktop app was moved into ui components as preparation for the Web App.
• Leaner Backend (Gated Execution for Nodes with feature flags, so these crates and code is not loaded into backend compilation)

Updated Dependencies

• LanceDB upgraded to latest version
• DataFusion upgraded to latest version
• Rig upgraded to latest version