What is a Comala workflow?

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Overview

A workflow codifies a business or compliance process into...

• 1 States and Transitions
• 2 Content reviews
• 3 Events → Triggers → Actions
• 4 Workflow Parameters
• 5 Workflow Template

States and Transitions

These define the milestones (states) and routes between them (transitions) of your process. Transitions can take place based on content change, a content review, or a trigger action.

Content reviews

Content reviews (known as approvals) are key events in the content production lifecycle, where reviewers check the content and decide whether to approve or reject the content. Based on this decision the workflow moves the content to a new workflow state - a content review transition. For each review, you can assign one or more users as reviewers.

Events → Triggers → Actions

As users interact with content and the workflow, events are sent, such as a state change, an approved review decision, or a task assigned.

One or more workflow triggers can be set to listen for an event such as a state change to a specific state.

When the event occurs, the trigger can set one or more actions. These include sending a custom email, setting a message, or changing the state.

Workflow Parameters

Workflow parameters can be used as placeholders for the values of users who are reviewers for approvals; duration periods for the expiry of your content or labels to be added to your documents.

Using workflow parameters in your workflow allows you to create a workflow that can be used for different teams or projects but with these values set elsewhere.

One or more workflow parameters can easily be added to a workflow using workflow builder visual editor.

A workflow parameter can be set to use one of the following data types

• character string

• Confluence username(s)

• Confluence groupname(s)

• duration

• a list of set values

The parameter value can be accessed in the workflow by their name wrapped in @ (at) symbol and used in a range of macros including the approval macro, the state-selection macro and trigger macros.

Workflow Template

A Comala Document Management workflow is scripted using JSON code and is stored in a template.

A workflow template can be added and applied to an individual page, or more usually in production mode, a workflow is added and applied to all content across a space.

Workflows can be created and edited using the workflow builder visual editor.

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