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Build a flow visually

For the concept, see Flows; this recipe walks building one in the Kapi Desktop editor instead of writing YAML by hand.

Goal: assemble a multi-step flow, say recycle → translate → qa, by dragging tools onto a canvas, configuring each in a form, and running it against your content without leaving the app.

Outdated wording

The narration uses terminology that has since been retired. The interface and the behaviour shown are unchanged. The clip comes from the Kapi Desktop tour, where it introduces flow composition in general. It does not follow this recipe's sequence of adding tools to the canvas, configuring a step, and running the flow against content.

Steps​

  1. Open the flow editor. Open Toolbox → Flows and create a new flow (or edit an existing one). The canvas shows the ordered steps; the palette lists every tool the installed plugins provide.
  2. Add tools. Drag a tool from the palette onto the canvas. The editor places it in reading order and shows what each step consumes and produces, so incompatible orderings are visible before you run.
  3. Configure each step. Select a step to open its config form, the same parameters as the Tool reference, rendered as inputs with their defaults. No YAML, no remembering flag names.
  4. Run it. With a project open, press Run and pick the content to run against. The runner streams per-file progress; output lands in the project store, ready to merge out.
  5. Save. With a project open, the Flows tab lists the flows in its recipe and writes your edits back to kapi.yaml under flows:, so the flow is versioned and runs identically from kapi run. Without a project, a flow is saved under your kapi config directory for reuse; Add to project copies it into an open project's recipe.

Why the desktop​

The editor makes a flow's shape legible (the order of steps, what each one needs, and where it writes) and runs it live while you tune the configuration. The result is an ordinary recipe flow: nothing in the file is desktop-specific, so the same flow runs in CI from the command line.

Next​