Designer overview

The Zoan Designer is the desktop application where you design your automations. You drag activities (blocks that do one specific action: open a browser, read an Excel file, send an email) onto a canvas and configure them in a properties panel.

Each automation you build is called a playbook: a sequence of activities, from top to bottom, that the robot runs step by step.

Where does the Designer fit?

The Designer is one of the two applications in the Zoan Platform installer (the other one is the Agent). In the Designer you design, debug and publish; with the Agent and Zoan Cloud you operate in production. If you don’t have it installed yet, follow Getting started.

The interface, area by area

When you open a project you see five areas. The documentation uses these names throughout.

#	Area	Where	What it is for
1	Left panel	Next to the rail, on the left	One view at a time, chosen in the rail: Outline, Activities (the palette) or Project. More →
2	Canvas	Center	Where you build the flow by stacking activities. The visual order is the execution order. More →
3	Properties	Right side	The parameters of the selected activity, with their help. More →
4	Bottom panel	Below the canvas	Problems, Console, Variables, Arguments, Call stack and Breakpoints tabs.
5	Top bar	Top	Record, Debug, Run and Publish, the command palette (Ctrl+K) and your Zoan Cloud account.

The rail and the left panel (1)

The rail, on the left edge, shows each view with its icon and its name. Clicking the active view hides the panel and gives the canvas more room.

View	What it shows
Outline	The numbered tree of the playbook, with the same numbers as the canvas. The 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 buttons collapse it to that level, and steps with errors carry a red dot (so does the rail).
Activities	The palette: every installed activity, grouped by package, with Recent and Favorites at the top. See Activity palette.
Project	The project files: playbooks, data and resources. From here you open, rename, duplicate or leave files out of the package, and drag a playbook onto the canvas to invoke it.
Packages	Opens the Package manager to install or update activity packages. A counter tells you when new versions are available.
Settings	Opens the Designer Settings: language, editor, Zoan Cloud session and keyboard shortcuts.

Canvas (2)

Activities are stacked vertically on a line that joins them; there are no arrows to connect. Some activities (If, For Each, Try Catch…) contain lanes with their own steps: Body, Then, Else, Try, Catch, Finally. Above the canvas, a tab row shows the open playbooks and, on the right, the editing actions (new playbook, save, undo, redo, cut, copy, paste), the activity count and the scale. See Canvas and nodes.

Properties (3)

When you select an activity, this panel shows its name, its description and its parameters grouped by section, with the output (Save result in) at the end. The ? icon next to the name opens that activity’s page in this documentation. Every field with ƒx accepts an expression. While debugging, the header adds Watch and Locals to see values.

Bottom panel (4)

Tab	What for
Problems	Live errors and warnings of the playbook, without running it. A click takes you to the activity and the field.
Console	What happens when running: Log messages, errors and duration.
Variables	The playbook variables, with their type and initial value. See Variables.
Arguments	The playbook inputs and outputs.
Call stack	Where the run is stopped while debugging.
Breakpoints	All of the project’s breakpoints.

Ctrl+J collapses or expands the panel.

Top bar (5)

Action	What it does
☰ menu	The File, Edit, View, Debug, Tools and Help menus. Alt opens it.
Project name	Switches project, opens a recent one or the project properties.
Command palette (Ctrl+K)	Searches commands, activities (it adds them after the selected one) and files. It also takes a pasted error or a Zoan Cloud execution id to jump to the activity that failed.
Record	Turns what you do in the browser or in a desktop application into activities. See UI Discover.
Debug (F6) / Run (F5)	Run the playbook on your machine. See Debugging.
Publish	Uploads the project to Zoan Cloud as a new version, or saves it as a .zoan file. See Publish and version.

The status bar, at the bottom, shows the mode (Design, Running, Paused), the selected activity, the Discover extension connection, the error and warning count (a click opens Problems) and the Zoan Cloud environment (a click changes it).

Your Zoan Cloud session

To publish, debug against Zoan Cloud and use its queues, credentials and processes, click Sign in to Zoan Cloud on the top bar. The Designer opens the browser on Authorize Zoan Designer. You sign in as you do on the portal (with your password, two-step verification or your organization’s single sign-on) and go back to the app. The Designer never sees your password.

Since version 1.2.30, Zoan Designer and Zoan Agent share your session on the computer:

• If you already signed in to Zoan Agent with the same Zoan Cloud, the Designer signs in with that session without opening the browser.
• If the Designer is open when you sign in or out of Zoan Agent, it catches up on its own, without restarting it.
• Sign out in the Designer also signs you out of Zoan Agent and of Zoan Cloud.
• Each Zoan Cloud (each address or organization) has its own session: if the Designer and the Agent use different Zoan Clouds, they do not mix.
• The session is stored encrypted and only your Windows user can open it. On a server with several people connected, each one has their own.

When you update to this version, the session you already had is kept: you do not need to sign in again.

Projects and playbooks

• A project is the folder that groups your work: one or more playbooks, plus the resources they need (templates, sample data, Config.xlsx).
• A playbook is one specific automation inside the project (a .play file in the playbooks folder).

A project can have several playbooks. One of them is the main one (main, the one that runs first), and you invoke the others from it with the Invoke Playbook activity. That way you reuse logic and split large automations into small, manageable pieces.

Project "Invoicing"
├── playbooks/
│   ├── main.play              ← main playbook
│   ├── ProcessInvoice.play    ← invoked from main with Invoke Playbook
│   └── SendNotification.play
└── templates/
    └── invoice.docx           ← resource, referenced with asset("templates/invoice.docx")

Split and reuse

If you find yourself copying and pasting the same group of activities, turn it into a separate playbook and invoke it. A change in one place reaches everyone who uses it.

The workflow, from start to finish

flowchart LR
  A[Create or open a project] --> B[Add activities] --> C[Configure properties] --> D[Declare variables] --> E[Run and debug] --> F[Publish to Zoan Cloud]
  E -. fix .-> B

1. Create or open a project from the start screen, blank or from a template with error handling already solved.
2. Add activities from the palette (dragging them) or with Ctrl+K, in the order they must run.
3. Configure each activity in the properties panel.
4. Declare variables to pass data from one activity to another and capture results.
5. Run or debug to check that it works. The Problems panel tells you before running what would fail. See Debugging.
6. Publish to Zoan Cloud with a version number, to run it unattended and on a schedule. Before uploading, the Designer checks that every activity exists in the published version of its package. See Publish and version.

Designing and operating

In the Designer you test on your own machine, with the browser visible and you watching. In production, the robot runs on its own, often without a screen. Testing well in the Designer before publishing saves you diagnosing in production.

Next steps

• Canvas and nodes: how the flow looks and how you operate it.
• Activity palette: find the activity you need.
• Variables and Expressions: move and transform data.
• Getting started: a full tutorial building your first playbook.