calling-children-flows.md

description
Learn how to effectively use the Chatflow Tool and the Custom Tool

Calling Children Flows

---

One of the powerful features of Flowise is that you can turn flows into tools. For example, having a main flow to orchestrate which/when to use the necessary tools. And each tool is designed to perform a niece/specific thing.

This offers a few benefits:

• Each children flow as tool will execute on its own, with separate memory to allow cleaner output
• Aggregating detailed outputs from each children flow to a final agent, often results in higher quality output

You can achieve this by using the following tools:

• Chatflow Tool
• Custom Tool

Chatflow Tool

1. Have a chatflow ready. In this case, we create a Chain of Thought chatflow that can go through multiple chainings.

2. Create another chatflow with Tool Agent + Chatflow Tool. Select the chatflow you want to call from the tool. In this case, it was Chain of Thought chatflow. Give it a name, and an appropriate description to let LLM knows when to use this tool:

3. Test it out!

4. From the response, you can see the input and output from the Chatflow Tool:

Custom Tool

With the same example as above, we are going to create a custom tool that will calls the Prediction API of the Chain of Thought chatflow.

1. Create a new tool:

Tool Name	Tool Description
ideas_flow	Use this tool when you need to achieve certain objective

Input Schema:

Property	Type	Description	Required
input	string	input question	true

Javascript Function of the tool:

const fetch = require('node-fetch');
const url = 'http://localhost:3000/api/v1/prediction/<chatflow-id>'; // replace with specific chatflow id

const body = {
	"question": $input
};

const options = {
	method: 'POST',
	headers: {
		'Content-Type': 'application/json'
	},
	body: JSON.stringify(body)
};

try {
	const response = await fetch(url, options);
	const resp = await response.json();
	return resp.text;
} catch (error) {
	console.error(error);
	return '';
}

2. Create a Tool Agent + Custom Tool. Specify the tool we've created in Step 1 in the Custom Tool.

3. From the response, you can see the input and output from the Custom Tool:

Conclusion

In this example, we have successfully demonstrate 2 ways of turning other chatflows into tools, via Chatflow Tool and Custom Tool. Both are using the same code logic under the hood.