A workflow determines the state(s) that a content item can have. The state of a content item determines whether it is visible on the frontend of your website, whether it can be edited and by whom, and so forth. A workflow also determines the order that states can be moved through. For example, consider the simple workflow "Planned - Published". When a content item is first created, it is in the "Planned" state. Content items in the "Planned" state are not visible on the website frontend. When the workflow state of a content item is changed from "Planned" to "Published", it becomes visible on the website frontend. Depending on your organization, you might want to create more complicated workflows that add intermediate steps such as "Ready for Review", "Review in Progress", "Review Completed" and so forth. As content items pass through different workflow states, specific roles have specific rights to modify a content item's settings and/or content. A workflow model also defines the order that the states must be transitioned through. For example, it can enforce the condition that a content item can only move from the "Planned" state to the "Ready for review" and not directly from "Planned" to "Published".
A workflow activity can have conditions assigned to it. A condition defines the properties a content item must have or the conditions it must meet in order to be able to transition from its current state to the following state. For example, you can define the condition that a content item must have a title before it can go from the "Planned" state to the "Published" state.
You can apply a workflow to content items of the following types:
A single workflow can be used for different parts of a website, however, these parts may be maintained by different user roles. For this reason, you can define a generic workflow template, which is referred to as the "workflow repository model". At the outset, this template is not yet related to any user roles, pages, page sections or Content Repository items. From the workflow, you can create one or more workflow models. A workflow model does have user roles and has been assigned to one or more pages, page sections, Content Repository items or forms. In a parent/child page hierarchy, you can specify whether the child pages inherit their workflow model from the parent page or whether they use another workflow model.
In a workflow, the following properties are defined:
The workflow model is assigned at the level of the content item. At this level, it also determines which roles are allowed to perform specific activities. Because items in the Content Repository are unstructured, individual Content Repository items of the same type, such as an article, each use a different workflow model. The workflow model "Planned - Published" comes standard with XperienCentral. It is possible to change this workflow model or to add new workflow models.
To create a workflow, follow these steps:
A state is the position the content item is currently in. In XperienCentral the state of an object is either "Public" or "Not public". The list of current states appears in the "States" section:
When an object is in a "Public" state, it can be visible on the frontend of the website. When it is in a "Not public" state, it cannot be visible on the frontend of the website.
To add a state, follow these steps:
To delete a state, follow these steps:
An activity is a single step in a flow of activities, which, as a whole, is identified as a specific process within an organization. Examples of activities are "create new article", "delete page" and "review article". Each activity has a set of permissions assigned to it. Roles may be attached to activities in order to determine which roles are authorized to perform that specific activity. Multiple roles can be attached to an activity.
To add an activity, follow these steps:
To delete an activity, follow these steps:
Actions determine the flow between statuses. When the status of a content item is changed from one to another, an action determines which activity becomes the new active activity. When the new activity becomes active, its set of permissions determines what tasks can be performed on content items. With every state change, a content item becomes subject to a new activity. An activity may have multiple subsequent activities, but only one activity can be chosen as the next step in the workflow. A workflow action defines a source activity, a destination activity and the condition of the transition. Workflow actions are defined in the "Actions" section of an activity, where the source activity is the current activity, the destination activity is the "Go to activity" and the condition is the "When changed to the status" field.
To add an action, follow these steps:
To delete an action, follow these steps:
A condition defines the circumstance(s) under which a content item is allowed to transition from one workflow state to another. The condition is based on a specific property or condition belonging to a content item. For example, a condition can prevent a content item from transitioning from the "Planned" to the "Published" state if it does not have a title or if it does not have an expiration date assigned to it. A condition can be global and apply to all content types or you can select the specific content type to which it applies.
To add a condition to an action, follow these steps:
To delete a condition from an action, follow these steps:
It is possible to copy a workflow. This is useful in cases where you want to create a new workflow that differs slightly from an existing workflow. This allows you to quickly and easily duplicate all activities, states, conditions, and so forth within a workflow and then modify the parts of it that you want to. To do so, follow these steps:
Select "Is published" when the workflow is completely configured so you can start applying the repository model to content items.
In this section, an example workflow is created containing the following states:
This figure is closely related to the state transition figure above, however, instead of states, this figure shows the activities for each state.
The activities are:
We will define the following authorization rules:
The go from the activity Maintain Reviewed Object activity to Maintain Published Object will have the condition "Title required" which means that it cannot transition without a title.
Perform following steps to define a new workflow:
The following steps are required to implement a workflow:
This section describes the common errors that can occur while working with workflows.
Error message: Workflow. The model contains multiple initiator activities.
How to solve: XperienCentral determines dynamically which activity in the workflow is the initiator activity. The initiator activity is the activity which has no preceding activity (Go to activity). This error will show if there is more than one activity without a preceding activity.
Error message: Workflow is invalid. No activities defined
How to solve: No activities have been created yet. This message will disappear when activities have been created.