Cycles

Cycles are commonly used in programming to define routines that need to repeat until some condition is met. Similarly a workflow may need to contain a cycle of operations if some subroutine needs to keep running until a condition is met.

Cycles are not a special or specific operation in crossflow. A cycle is simply what happens when the output of an operation is connected to the input slot of an operation upstream of it.

When building a workflow, you are free to connect an output to the input slot of any operation that expects a compatible message type. There are no restrictions on how these connections are laid out, except that each output connects to exactly one input slot—but each input slot can take in any number of outputs, leaving an opening for downstream operations to connect their outputs back upstream.