Workflow best practice - How to avoid specific usernames?

asked on January 16, 2019

I'm trying to come up with a way to setup my workflows to avoid using specific usernames so that when there are staffing changes, the workflows don't need to be updated. Several of these involve routing work to a specific user based on alphabetical assignments, but I'm working on one today that involves a bit of reporting.

The scenario is that a director would like info emailed to him each day about how many changes each user is making in a specific folder. He really just wants a count of changes per user. I have setup a Search query to find all applicable results (modified/created in the last day, and retrieving the last modified by username), but I'm struggling with how to convert this into the data that is needed. I don't want to set up a conditional decision with a branch for each username.

Ideas?

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replied on January 16, 2019

I would likely accomplish this in one of two ways.

1. If you have audit trail, use it, this is a perfect use case for this.

2. If you must use workflow, I would first do your overall search to find all the different usernames that have changed the data, then one at a time I would fill a multivalue token with each of the user names that have modified for that day when looping through all the results of your overall search. Then remove duplicates using the built in token functions. Finally, for each of those I would perform perform their own subsearch using the For Each Value loop where you are looking for who modified files for the specific user account for that same time period.

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replied on January 16, 2019

I would agree that Audit Trail is the better option. The big reason for this is the Workflow approach only catches the latest change.

As an example, if I go into a folder and change 20 documents, but other employees come in and change 10 of those same documents after me, then it would look like I only made 10 changes.

Another example, if I export a document to a briefcase then import it 10 days later, it would retain the original creation/modification date meaning the Workflow would not pick that up.

Audit Trail on the other hand tracks as much as you tell it to track so you don't have to worry about those same "gaps" in the data.

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replied on January 16, 2019 • Show version history

Unfortunately our system is not robust enough to handle running AuditTrail, but you bring up some good points. And I will definitely try the Workflow method that John mentioned. Thank you both!

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replied on January 16, 2019

Out of curiosity, which aspects of Audit Trail cause issues in your environment?

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replied on January 16, 2019

It was disabled before I took this position at my company, so I couldn't say for sure. The more I work with Laserfiche though, the more I think we need to figure out how to get AuditTrail up and running.

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replied on January 16, 2019

I haven't ever seen Audit Trail putting an appreciable load on the server. Just be really cautious about setting up how much data it extracts to the reporting database.

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Workflow best practice - How to avoid specific usernames?

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