Okta Certified Workflows - Specialty · Part II

Create Groups

26% of Part II — group lifecycle from connection to membership.

Create Groups

Task 3: Name a Group

4 tasks · this deck covers task 3 of 4

The Task

"Name a group"

The Create Group card's Name input (Task 2) rarely gets a hardcoded string in a real flow — it gets built dynamically from other fields using Number and Text functions, so the group name reflects data captured earlier in the flow (a department, a date, a request ID).

The Mechanism — Text Functions

"When you're adding, subtracting, splitting, or concatenating inputs, the manipulation of both numbers and text is a critical piece of building an automation." Three text functions matter most for constructing a group name:

Compose

"Compose is one of the most useful text functions. It allows you to create any message and includes the ability to drag inputs into the message. The compose card supports both HTML and Markdown. This is functionally similar to the Concatenate function."

Compose is the go-to for building a group name from multiple pieces — e.g., stitching a department name and a request ID together.

Find & Text Segment

Find — "search inside text... this function will return an output field of '-1' if the text is not found." If found, returns the position.

Text Segment — extract a portion of text "by specifying the start and end locations within the text... a word, a character, or a series of words and characters."

These matter when a naming convention requires pulling a substring out of an existing value (e.g., trimming a domain suffix before appending it to a group name).

Number Functions

"Number functions are used to perform common math operations, such as Add, Subtract, Multiply, and Divide," plus more complex ones like Round, Remainder, and Factorial — useful if your naming convention embeds a sequence number or calculated value.

The Angle — What Trips People Up

Watch for this in your own sandbox run:

→ Forgetting that Find returns -1, not an error or empty value, when the search text isn't present — a downstream branch checking for "not found" needs to test for -1 specifically.

→ Reaching for Concatenate when Compose already covers the same ground plus HTML/Markdown formatting.

One Line To Remember

Group names built dynamically use Text functions — Compose (drag-in concatenation, HTML/Markdown-capable) is the primary tool, with Find (returns -1 if not found) and Text Segment (start/end substring extraction) for more surgical string work. Number functions cover any numeric piece of the naming convention.

Sources: help.okta.com — Numbers and text (type=wf&id=ext-about-numbers-text)

Next: Task 4 →