rasa-building-flows

Building Flows in Rasa

Workflow

1. Identify the business process the user wants to implement.
2. Review existing flows, slots, responses, and actions. Reuse before creating new ones.
3. Scope the work — one file per business process, one flow per user goal (see "Scoping a flow").
4. Create or open the YAML file under data/, named after the primary flow (see "File organization").
5. Define the flow with a snake_case ID (see "Naming conventions").
6. Write the flow description (see "Writing descriptions").
7. Add steps: collect for user input, action for responses or invoking custom actions.
8. Write descriptions for collect steps (see "Writing descriptions").
9. Add branching with next/if/then/else where the process has decision points (see "Branching and conditions").
10. Extract reusable sub-tasks into child flows via call (see "Connecting flows").
11. Connect follow-up flows via link if a separate process should start after.
12. Ensure all referenced slots, responses, and actions exist in the domain (see "Ensure domain completeness").
13. Validate the project (see "Fixing validation errors").

Scoping a flow

A flow represents one business process from the user's perspective. Use these questions to decide whether something warrants its own flow:

1. Does a user explicitly ask for this? → yes = flow
2. Can it run independently from start to finish? → yes = flow
3. Is it a sub-task reused by multiple flows? → yes = child flow with if: False
4. Is it just one action at the end of another flow? → no, keep it inline

Right-sized flow - a single user goal with a clear start and end:

flows:
  track_order:
    description: Lets users check the delivery status of an existing order.
    steps:
      - collect: order_id
      - action: action_fetch_order_status
      - action: utter_order_status
      # ... can also include branching, call, link steps as needed

Too big - multiple unrelated goals in one flow. Split them: