Introduction to Subflows

Subflows are snippets of flows.

A subflow is a dataflow that can be reused within other dataflows. Subflows are useful when you want to create a reusable process that can be easily incorporated into dataflows. For example, you might want to create a subflow that performs deduplication using certain settings in each stage so that you can use the same deduplication process in multiple dataflows. To do this you could create a subflow like this:

You could then use this subflow in a dataflow. For example, you could use the deduplication subflow within a dataflow that performs geocoding so that the data is deduplicated before the geocoding operation:

In this example, data would be read in from a database then passed to the deduplication subflow, where it would be processed through Match Key Generator, then Intraflow Match, then Best of Breed, and finally sent out of the subflow and on to the next stage in the parent dataflow, in this case Geocode US Address. Subflows are represented as a puzzle piece icon in the dataflow, as shown above.

Subflows that are saved and exposed are displayed in the User Defined Stages folder.