Workflow Warnings

Workflows interact with many different parts of the system. It may be that you limit a workflow to a department or a time off type or that checks get performed against documents, forms, reports, and more.

As a result, it is sometimes possible that a workflow may not behave as expected as an item or a number of items may no longer be active when the workflow is operational.

Often, this is fine. For example, if you have listed 3 sites as valid sites for a workflow and one of those no longer exist, the workflow will then still work fine against the other two types. However, let's say you removed that site and then added it again and the workflow was ONLY set to trigger against that site, you will find that the workflow no longer triggers, because as far as the system is concerned, the original site no longer exists, despite having a new site with the same name.

To help identify issues of this type, we have added a warning function to workflows which will identify some of the most common issues which can occur in workflows due to invalid references.

We check for:

• Departments;
• Sites;
• Headcount classifications;
• Regions;
• Job status;
• Business unit;
• Cost centre;
• Companies.

In all of the above, we check that the item exists and is active.

Additionally, we also check for:

• Time off types (for time off and time off deletion workflows)
• Forms (for send new form and form check steps)
• Recruitment stages (for update recruitment stage steps)
• Library training courses (for training check steps)
• Templates exist (for create template steps - we check if the template exists and if the template has the necessary mandatory document indicator)
• Reports (for send link to report steps - we also check if the report has been shared, but not who it has been shared to)
• Pages (for send link to page steps)
• Documents (for send link to document steps and send a document for signing steps)

When sending the workflow to employees, it is possible that the person you choose is no longer active. In addition to this, we check any steps are set to be sent to a named employee to ensure that they are still active.

Finally, within a workflow, it is possible to trigger another workflow or move to a different step in the same workflow. Because of this, we check if:

• The workflow exists and is active (for a step that triggers a new workflow)
• Workfow step exists (for a step that moves to a different step in the same workflow)

If any of the above checks fail, you will see a red warning notice in the Status column in the workflows screen:

You can click this to see the warnings themselves: