What is a Comala workflow?
- Robert Alexander Marshall
Overview
A workflow codifies a business or compliance process into...
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.
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.
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 workflow is stored as a JSON template. The available workflows in a space are listed in the space document management dashboard.
Three workflows are included on installing Comala Document Management. These are appended with a TEMPLATE lozenge in the dashboard.
The included workflows cannot be overwritten but can be copied in the space document management dashboard and edited to create a custom workflow.
You can also create a new custom workflow using the visual builder or import a workflow template as JSON code using the code editor.
Custom workflows are added to the space document management dashboard.
The workflows in the space document dashboard are displayed in the workflow picker when choosing the Add Workflow breadcrumb on a page and applying a workflow to an individual page or blog posts as a page workflow.
A Comala Document Management workflow can easily be edited or created using the workflow builder visual editor.
Each workflow is scripted using JSON code and is stored in a template. The workflow template can be edited in the code editor.
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 by the space administrator.
Related Guides