Workflow Authoring Guide

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This Workflow Authoring Guide for Comala Document Management for Data Center and Server is aimed at workflow authors – people who are creating workflow templates at the content, space and global level.

What is a Comala workflow?

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

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

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This guide should be used together with the

• User Guide

• Space Admin Guide

States and Transitions

These define the milestones (states) and routes between them (transitions) of your process.

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. For each review, you can assign one or more users as reviewers.

Tasks

Workflow tasks provide similar functionality to Confluence tasks, but they are stored at page level rather than in the content itself. They can be added manually by a user or by the workflow itself. Tasks can be assigned to specific users.

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, updating a metadata value or changing the state.

You can use these triggers to augment the content production process and automate workflow transitions.

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, within a space or on a specific document.

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

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

These parameter references 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.

Examples of the use of workflow parameters include

Workflow Template

Comala workflows are scripted using macro notation, which is stored in a template. Templates can then be applied to individual pages (in Page Mode), or more usually in production mode to all content across a space (in Space Mode).

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

See: Templates, Macros, Examples, Save a workflow as a template

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