Is Amazon Connect Flow language useless?

Question

[ Amazon Connect Flow language](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/connect/latest/APIReference/flow-language-example.html) is JSON-based representation of a series of flow actions, and the criteria for moving between them. In other words, what we draw manually using flowchart can be represented in JSON format. Amazon Connect Flow editor also provides a an option to "export" and "import" the JSON files.

However, I can't imagine any practical use case or scenario where those JSON files could be helpful. We could consider a case where we export our flows into JSON files and later in case of disaster or if we simply want to create a copy of the existing instance, we could use those files.

The problem is that when you export an existing flow (or usually flows) it **exports ARNs of all existing resources**. In particular JSON files contain ARNs of all queues which are unique and belong to **only current amz connect instance**. When this instance is gone all ARNs become invalid and so we can't use those JSON files for import and restore the flows in a new amz connect instance.

First creating an new amz connect instance and resources and later replacing ARNs inside a JSON manually does not make sense either.

**So, could someone explain what is the purpose of the Amazon Connect Flow language and how to use it?**
 
PS: Please don't post links to the AWS docs, they are useless.

Dan Bloy · Answer

If you import a flow from 1 instance to another it will resolve resources using the resource name. The UI will provide you a yellow warning, but upon save the correct ARN is resolved.

Therefore using the import and export between east and west (for failover) or within your dev ops pipelines (for path to live) will work fine if you maintain a good naming standard.

Thanks
Dan

Thomas_R · Answer

You can also design your contact flow to not hard code resources like queues, bots, lambdas and even prompts. 
These can be stored in Dynamo DB and loaded in at runtime.
This also allows you to update prompts without editing or re-deploying flows.

AWS-User-0852829 · Answer

The major role of those JSON files is to export/import contact flows between different environments like Dev/UAT/Prod or for troubleshooting purpose. Those ARNs can be easily replaced by the resources in your Contact center like queues, hours of operations, lambda, etc.

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AWS-User-0852829

answered 2 years ago

Is Amazon Connect Flow language useless?

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