Prevent broken action flows when referenced services are removed

Objective

• Prevent action flows from silently breaking when a service or bundle they reference is removed, disabled, or renamed.
• Give admins visibility and guardrails (warnings, dependency lists, or safe fallbacks) before destructive service changes.

Background

• During service cleanup and acquisitions, old bundles stay in place because hidden references in flows, notifications, and promos are hard to discover.
• When references break, conditions can go blank and flows stop firing—Decision needed on whether to block deletes, allow with warnings, or support remapping.

Scope

Backend

• Action flow execution and condition resolution live under attik-backend/src/util/functions/actionFlows/ (for example conditionsResolver.js, FullPopulatedDataForFlow.js, handleActionFlowTrigger.js) with entry routes such as src/routes/flowOnJob.ts and stream triggers like src/events/streamHandlers/quoteStream.ts.

Frontend

• Flow authoring UI under attik-frontend/src/app/tools/action-flow/ and shared condition helpers (templateVariables.ts importing templatingData) are where dependency surfacing might appear when services are edited.

References

• attik-backend/src/util/functions/actionFlows/
• attik-backend/src/routes/flowOnJob.ts
• attik-frontend/src/app/tools/action-flow/

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Original description

Prevent action flows from silently breaking when a referenced service or bundle is removed, disabled, or renamed. Admins should be warned about dependencies before making the change, and invalid references should not leave action flows unable to trigger.

Transcript Context

The team discussed needing to disable older single service bundles and service variants, but they are avoiding cleanup because those services may still be referenced inside action flow conditions, notifications, promos, or other hidden automations. When a referenced service disappears, the condition can become blank and stop the action flow from running.

The specific failure mode described in the transcript was that after a referenced service is deleted, the action flow can be left with a blank service condition that evaluates as false and blocks the flow from firing. A safer fallback would be to ignore empty references, warn before deletion, or offer a dependency/remapping path instead of silently breaking execution.

This is expected to happen repeatedly, not just once, especially during acquisitions and service migrations where older services are gradually replaced by new ones. The team wants a safer way to clean up or retire services without having to manually discover every action flow dependency first.

A comparison was made to systems that block deletion of a field when it is still used in workflows and show the list of affected workflows. A similar warning, dependency list, remapping path, or graceful fallback would help preserve existing automation work.