Designer overview

The Zoan Designer is the desktop application where you design your automations, without writing code. Instead of programming, you drag activities (blocks that do a specific action: open a browser, read an Excel, send an email) to a canvas and configure them by filling out forms.

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

Where does Designer fit in?

The Designer is one of two applications that come in the Zoan Platform installer (the other is Agent). In the Designer designs and tests; with the Agent and Zoan Cloud publish and 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 will see five zones. It is advisable to memorize them because we name them in all the documentation.

#	Area	where is	What is it for?
1	Paleta	Lateral izquierdo	Catalog of all available activities, grouped by package. You drag them to the canvas. More →
2	Canvas	Centro	The canvas where you create the flow by stacking activities. The visual order is the order of execution. More →
3	Properties	Right sidebar	The parameters of the selected activity. Here you configure each activity.
4	Variables	Panel inferior	The variables of the current playbook: data that travels between activities. More →
5	Toolbar	Barra superior	Acciones globales: guardar, ejecutar (probar local), publicar (subir a Zoan Cloud).

Palette (1)

Hierarchical list of packages and activities. It has a search engine at the top to filter by name. Only installed packages appear. See Activity Palette.

Canvas (2)

Nodes are stacked vertically; there are no arrows to connect: the flow is from top to bottom. Some activities (such as If, For Each, Try/Catch) contain sub-flows called lanes. See Canvas and nodes.

Properties (3)

When you select a node, this panel displays its parameters. Each field accepts a literal value or an expression (if it starts with =). See Expressions.

Variables (4)

Here you declare variables and see their type. A variable is the “container” where one activity stores its result for another to use later. See Variables.

Toolbar (5)

Action	What are you doing
Guardar	Persist the project on disk
Ejecutar	Run the playbook on your machine against the local Agent, to test it. See Debugging
Publicar	Packages the project and uploads it to Zoan Cloud as a version. See Publish and version

Projects and playbooks

• A project is the folder that groups your work: one or more playbooks, plus the resources they need (templates, example data).
• A playbook is a specific automation within the project.

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

Proyecto "Facturación"
├── main                 ← playbook principal
├── procesar-factura     ← se invoca desde main con Invoke Playbook
├── enviar-notificacion
└── plantillas/
    └── factura.docx     ← recurso, referenciable con asset("plantillas/factura.docx")

Divide y reutiliza

If you find yourself copying and pasting the same group of activities, make it a sub-playbook and invoke it. A change in one place is reflected in everyone who uses it.

The workflow, from start to finish

1. Create or open a project from the Designer home screen.
2. Drag activities from the palette to the canvas, in the order in which they should be executed.
3. Configure each activity in the properties panel.
4. Declare variables to pass data from one activity to another and capture results.
5. Run locally (Run button) to verify that it works and fix errors. See Debugging.
6. Publish to Zoan Cloud (Publish button) with a version number, so it can be run unattended and scheduled. See Publish and version.

Design and operate are two worlds

In the Designer you test on your own machine, with the browser visible and you watching. In production, the bot runs alone, usually without a screen. That’s why it’s a good idea to test well in the Designer before publishing: what fails locally will fail just as much (or worse) unattended.

Next steps

• Canvas and nodes — how the flow looks and operates.
• Activity palette — find the activity you need.
• Variables y Expresiones — mover y transformar datos.
• Getting started — complete tutorial building your first playbook.