annie79
commented
11 months ago Hi Phillip, First of all, thank you for trying out the 23.2 APEX Workflow and sharing a great blog post on the topic! Regarding the questions you've raised in your blog post, I'll try to respond here.
Q: How do I visualize the current state of a workflow instance for the users? Flows has this and is extremely useful. A: This is on the Workflow Roadmap and we plan to prioritize it for our future release(s).
Q: Is this only scoped for developers, or meant to be something you can discuss with and show to non-technical people? A: This is something you can discuss and show to non-technical people. The visualization makes it easier to demonstrate and communicate the business logic to non-technical people.
Q: How can we wait for user input? There are waiting activities, but I did not find a way to set variables for an existing workflow instance. There is an API for that, but it is only meant to be used by admins to resolve issues. A: The points at which users can interact with the Workflow are Human Task Activities. In 23.2 we have Action Tasks in addition to Approval Tasks. Action tasks are human tasks which do not have a defined Approve or Reject outcome. To learn more about them you could check this blog.
Q: How does the integration with “Approval Tasks” work? Can I set a variable in the workflow instance from there? A: The Task Outcome and Actual Owner values of the approval task can be returned to the workflow instance.
Q: In the “Participants” section, we can define roles, but only “Workflow Administrator” and “Workflow Owner” are available types. Can I fit roles like department X into this somehow?
A: The participants can be initialized through select queries /expressions and can be a list of comma-separated users. You could define a Participant named Department X of type Workflow Owner and in the Source enter something like
select users from department where department ='X'
Q: What are the plans to reduce the visual complexity of huge workflows? BPMN has swimlanes and call activities to group and hide details. Are there plans to add this? A: Yes, we have call activities in the roadmap and they will be coming in the future releases of Workflow
Please refer to my blog on APEX Workflow which has detailed demonstration of how workflows interact with approval tasks and action tasks along with description and usage of the various workflow artifacts.
Best Regards, Ananya
phartenfeller
nithyaramu82
Blogpost: https://hartenfeller.dev/blog/apex-23-2-workflows-first-look
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