Promote a flow

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REST API Equivalent: You can use the /config/{app}/flows/{flow}/promote operation to promote a flow to a different app.

Many organizations have multiple applications; in particular, organizations often have a “production app” (the application employed when users visit a website) as well as a dev app and/or a staging app. In cases like that, flow development and testing take place in the dev/staging environment and, when the flow is ready for actual use, the flow is “promoted” to the production environment. For all intents and purposes, that means copying the flow from one application to another.

Actually, that’s not 100% correct: we should have said is that, as a general rule, Akamai would promote the flow to the production environment. Prior to the release of Registration Builder, promoting flows to a different application typically required you to file a support ticket and then wait for Akamai support personnel to carry out the task for you.

But that’s no longer the case. Thanks to Registration Builder, you can now promote flows from your dev/staging environment to your production environment, and can do so any time you want, and as many times as you want. Flow promotion is now entirely under your control.

Flows can be promoted to any of your applications, regardless of region: for example, if your dev environment is in the US region you can promote a flow to an application in the European region. There’s only one exception here: China functions as its own, unique region: you cannot promote a US flow to an application in the China region, nor can you promote a flow from the China region to an application in the US region. But other than that ….

In fact, the only real restriction when it comes to flow promotion is that you must hold the Application Admin or the Application Configuration Admin role in both the source application and the target application in order to promote a flow. If you’re an Application Admin in the dev application but only hold the User Profile Admin role in the production environment then you won’t be able to promote a flow to the production environment. And if you don’t have permission to promote a flow on the source application, then the Promote action won’t even be available to you:

And what if you are able to promote a flow, but don’t have the needed permissions in the applications you want to promote the flow to? Well, at the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, note the Choose an Application dialog box used when promoting flows:

If an application appears grayed-out in the dialog box, that means that you cannot promote the flow to that application; in the preceding example, flows cannot be promoted to Wayne Enterprises or to Sam’s Newer Multi App. Most of the time, that’s because you don’t have permission to promote a flow to those applications.

Assuming that you have the proper permissions, you can promote a flow to a different application by completing the following procedure:

On the Registration Flows page, click the Actions icon next to the flow that you want to promote, then click Promote:
In the Choose an Application dialog box, click Search for application by name or ID to select the target application from a dropdown list:

Alternatively, you can search for an application by typing a portion of the application's name or ID in the Search for application by name or ID field. As you type, the options available in the dropdown list will change based on the characters you have already entered. For example, if you type Sam’s C, only applications that have the string value Sam's C somewhere in the name or ID will be displayed:

And before you ask, remember that Sam’s C is the name of the application, not the name of the flow. That’s why we can use “forbidden” characters like the apostrophe and the blank space.
Select the appropriate application and then click Promote. After clicking Promote, one of two things will happen:
- If the flow (e.g., standard_janrain) doesn’t exist in the target application, the flow will be promoted (copied) to that application:
- If a flow by that name does exist in the target application, you’ll be asked if you want to overwrite the existing flow. To promote the flow to the target app, click Yes:
In the Promotion Success! dialog, click Close to remain on the current Console page, or click View to go to the Edit page for the newly-promoted flow:

Promoting a Previous Version of the Flow

The preceding procedure enables you to promote the latest version of a flow to a different application. That’s great, but what if you want to promote a prior version of a flow? Is there a way to do that?

As it turns out, there is. To promote a prior version of the flow, complete this procedure:

From the Registration Flows page, click the Actions icon next to the latest version of your flow, and then click Edit:
On the Edit page, click Show History to view the last 100 versions of the flow:
In the Version History – Previous 100 Versions pane, click the Promote flow icon next to the flow version you want to promote:

From there, follow the same steps used to promote the most-recent version of a flow.