Your First Workflow

This guide walks you through building and running your first workflow in Sovereign Workflows. By the end, you will have created a simple automation that fetches data and processes it — all through the visual Studio editor.

Open the Studio

After your stack is running (see Quick Start), navigate to your Sovereign deployment in the browser. From the main dashboard, click New Workflow to open the Studio editor.

The Studio is your workspace for building workflows visually. You will see three main areas:

• Canvas — the large central area where you assemble your workflow by placing and connecting nodes
• Node Palette — the left panel listing all available actions, organized by connector
• Properties Panel — the right panel where you configure a selected node's settings

Add Your First Node

In the Node Palette on the left, find the Sample connector and expand it. You will see several actions available, including Echo. This action takes an input message and returns it — perfect for testing.

Drag the Echo action from the palette onto the canvas. A new node appears representing this step. Click on it to open its settings in the Properties Panel.

In the Properties Panel, you will see fields for configuring the action. For the Echo action, enter a message — something like "Hello from my first workflow!" — in the message field.

Connect Nodes

Every workflow needs at least one step. For your first workflow, a single Echo node is enough to demonstrate the concept. But workflows become powerful when you chain steps together.

To add a second step, drag another action onto the canvas — for example, the Data action from the Sample connector. Then connect the two nodes by dragging from the output handle of your first node to the input handle of your second node. The arrow between them defines the order of execution.

Save and Run

Once you have placed and connected your nodes:

1. Click the Save button in the toolbar to save your workflow definition.
2. Click Run to execute the workflow immediately.

The Run Panel will appear showing the progress of your execution. You will see each step transition through its statuses: first it becomes ready, then it runs, and finally it succeeds (or fails if something went wrong).

View the Results

After your workflow completes, click on any step in the execution view to see its details:

• Inputs — what data was sent to the step
• Outputs — what the step returned
• Timing — how long the step took to execute

For your Echo action, you should see your message returned in the output.

What Happened Behind the Scenes

When you clicked Run, the following happened automatically:

1. The Engine received your execution request and identified which steps were ready to run
2. Ready steps were dispatched to an Executor Worker via the message queue
3. The Executor Worker ran your action (in this case, the Echo action) and reported the result back
4. The Engine received the result, marked the step as succeeded, and dispatched the next step in the chain
5. This continued until all steps completed

You did not need to configure any of this — the orchestration engine handles it for you.

Next Steps

Now that you have built and run your first workflow, explore these topics to go deeper:

• Core Concepts — understand the building blocks of workflows
• Studio Editor — learn the full capabilities of the visual editor
• Node Types — discover all the different types of steps you can use