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If you haven’t worked with Workflows before, check out our Getting Started with Workflows guide Workflow loops allow you to repeat a step multiple times for all values in a multi-valued custom field or expression.

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Adding a Workflow loop

To add a Workflow loop, simply click “Add a step” and then choose the “Create a loop” option. Returning to the main workflow screen, you will see a new loop block has appeared in your steps.

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Selecting a resource to loop over

The “Select a variable” dropdown will give you available resources you can loop over. This can be one of:
  • A multi-select custom field
  • An expression that returns a list of values.

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Adding steps to a Workflow loop

Once you’ve picked what you want to run your steps over, you can add Workflow steps to your loop using the “Add a step to this loop” button. This works just like adding a regular workflow step, and you can reference the value you are looping over in the step - you’ll find these at the top of any relevant menus, prepended by “Each”. In this example, we are looping over the custom field “Impacted surface”: You can add as many steps as you would like to a loop and re-order them by dragging and dropping, just like steps. They cannot be moved out of the loop, though.

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How often will workflow loops run?

Workflow loops function slightly differently from regular workflow steps - if the custom field or expression you are looping over changes, the loop will run its steps on any new values. Let’s elucidate this with an example: Imagine you have set up a workflow to run once per incident when the incident severity is critical or higher. You’ve got two steps:
  • Announce the incident in #product
  • For each team in the Affected Teams custom field:
    • Page the relevant escalation policy in PagerDuty
This workflow will function as follows:
  1. A critical incident is declared, affecting teams A and B . The workflow runs, posting the announcement and escalating following Policy-A and Policy-B .
  2. The Affected Teams custom field is updated to now include Team C
  3. The first step, posting the announcement, will not be re-run, since it has already been executed for this incident. However , the second, looping step will “catch up” with the new Affected Teams value by escalating to Policy-C .