Using workflows from the Action

Extension
The Workflow Action Extension brings the power of running workflows out of
Workflow itself and into other apps, extending automation capabilities to any
app that has a share sheet.

With the Action Extension, you can run workflows that act on the content
you’re looking at inside another app. For example, you could set up
workflows to grab all the images from a page in Safari, convert a text file
you’re viewing to a PDF, or make edits and act on images in your Photos
library. The possibilities are endless.

In many apps, you’ll find a share button (like ) that presents a share sheet
when tapped. Inside the share sheet, two rows of activites are offered: Share
Extensions with colored app icons, and Action Extensions with grayscale
icons.

In the second row, Workflow offers an Action Extension named “Run

Workflow”. (By default, the Action Extension won’t be visible as you need to
manually turn it on, as explained in the next section.) Tap it and a mini
version of Workflow will appear overlaid on top of the current app. From
here, you can select or search for any workflow that has been configured with
the Action Extension type. Just tap a workflow to run it.
The app you’re using may also pass data into the workflow as input. For
example, in Safari, the URL of the web page (or, the text you’ve selected from
the page, if there is any) will be passed as input. As discussed later, workflows
can be customized to only accept certain types of input.
In order to use the Workflow Action Extension, you first need to enable it in
an app that supports extensions.

Tap a share button in any app of your choosing (including Workflow

itself).
Swipe in the second row of icons to the far right side.
Tap More (•••).
In the list of activities that appears, find “Run Workflow” and turn on the
corresponding switch to enable it.

After the Workflow Action Extension has been enabled once, it will appear in
the bottom row of the share sheet in all of your apps.
In order to have your workflows show up in the Action Extension, they’ll need
to have the Action Extension type enabled.

You can change a workflow’s type by opening it from My Workflows, tapping

on the settings button in the upper right corner, and navigating to the section
entitled “What type of workflow is this?”. Tap “Action Extension” to enable
that type on the workflow. A new field named “Accepts” will appear
underneath where you can choose the input type.

Note

Workflows can be set to multiple types, so one workflow can work in both
the Action Extension and the Today Widget.

When creating a new workflow, you can quickly set the type of workflow you
want to build. Select ”Action Extension”, and you’ll see a small bar appear
above that says “This workflow accepts (Anything)”, which you can tap to set
the workflow‘s input types.
 Pro Tip

Workflows can be set to multiple types. A single workflow can be an

Action Extension, Today Widget, and Apple Watch workflow if you so
choose.

In order to have an organized Action Extension, it’s helpful to specify which

type of content you want an individual workflow to accept. Once you’ve set a
specific type, that workflow will only be visible in the Action Extension if the
app that is sharing the content provides that type of input. For example, a
workflow set up to only accept contacts won’t show up when opening the
extension from Maps.
The default setting is Anything, allowing a workflow to accept any type of
input. However, setting a workflow to Anything may mean that the
workflow is available to use even with content that won’t actually function
properly in the workflow. This can lead to errors and a cluttered up Action
Extension screen, making it harder to quickly find and launch the workflows
you want to use. Therefore, it’s helpful to change the type of input a workflow
accepts to be specific to the functionality of that workflow.

It takes some testing to determine the type of input an app will offer. Some
apps share multiple types of input, like Photos, which shares both images and
media. And for other apps, the shared content is less obvious. For example, if
you’re in Twitter and you share a tweet that contains a photo, Twitter only
sends the URL of the tweet, not the tweet text or photo.

You can preview the Action Extension input by placing a View Content
Graph action at the beginning of your workflow.

See the full list of input types and their definitions in Understanding Action
Extension input types, so you can be aware of the specifics when building
Action Extension workflows.

Note

Similar to the Today Widget, the Action Extension has a limited amount of
memory (RAM) to work with. This means that some workflows that work
with large volumes of data may overload, and unfortunately crash, the
Action Extension. If this happens, you can workaround it by placing a
Continue in App action in your workflow, which will switch to the
Workflow app and finish running your workflow there where more
memory is available.

Now let’s move on to Using workflows from Apple Watch. Or, jump back to
Using workflows from the Today Widget.