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Question

Why are my Cloud Workflow starting events being disabled on their own?

Laserfiche Cloud Workflow
Updated January 31, 2024
asked on January 29, 2024

I was wondering why Cloud Workflow events were getting disabled automatically without anyone ever unchecking the box in the config and finally reproduced it.

Whenever I import a copy of a workflow I previously exported, the original workflow it was exported from automatically has it's starting event disabled without any warning.

Why does this happen?

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Answer

SELECTED ANSWER
replied on January 29, 2024

I don't know if you can prevent the export from including the Starting Rule, but you're not required to bring the Starting Rule back in during the Workflow import.

When you're in the Starting Events part of the Workflow import, under "Action" for the rule select "Discard". The Starting Rule won't be imported with the Workflow and thus can't overwrite/modify any existing Rules.

We've just filed Cloud Workflow user story 507094 "I want to be warned when importing a starting event would disable an in-use starting rule" so hopefully in the future you'll get a heads up. Because Cloud starting rules and their support for many:one attachments work differently than self-hosted Workflow's 1:1 starting rules, it definitely makes sense to throw a warning in the import process if you're about to make a change that impacts existing workflows.

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Replies

replied on January 29, 2024

Starting events are defaulted to off in the import wizard to give you a chance to review the workflow before making it live. You can enable it during import if you don't need review.

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replied on January 29, 2024

This is the starting event for my new workflow though, the starting event on whatever workflow was originally used to create the WFX file gets disabled when it is used to create a new workflow.

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replied on January 29, 2024

What "Action" do you have selected for the starting rule import when this occurs? If the starting rule is replacing/importing over the existing one with the same name, it'll be disabled because not checking Enable is at a technical level "Set Enabled=false" rather than "Take no action".

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replied on January 29, 2024

That would make more sense, but I am not replacing the workflow in any of these cases. I am choosing to create a new workflow, the new workflow can have its rule disabled by default and that's fine, by why would whatever workflow was originally used to create the export file get disabled without any warning. It is a production workflow.

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replied on January 29, 2024 • Show version history

Starting Rules and Workflows are independent objects. They can obviously be linked/attached, but a Starting Rule is not a child component that "belongs" to a specific Workflow. Multiple workflows can be attached to the same starting event, which is what's happening here.

From the Starting Events documentation:

Starting events make it easy to define how you want your processes to start. You can define your starting events once and attach them to as many processes as you like. You can also leave the starting events open-ended, so that you can define the logic before you know the specific processes you want to run.

It's not the original workflow (WF A) is "getting disabled". It's that WF A is linked to Starting Rule 1. Then WF B gets imported along with the same Starting Rule 1 (not a new object with the same rules, the same object). And Starting Rule 1 gets disabled during import because Enable isn't checked.

So then you have:

  • Starting Rule 1 attached workflows:
    • WF A
    • WF B
  • Starting Rule 1 status: Disabled (during the import process for WF B)

get disabled without any warning

It should probably throw a warning during the import process to make you aware if you're about to change the enabled/disabled state of a Starting Rule that already has other workflows attached. We're discussing that internally.

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replied on January 29, 2024

In this case, how do I create a backup of my workflow that is not attached to a starting rule. I don't want the starting rule of my workflow getting disabled because of a backup file being restored as a new workflow.

In On Prem we have both Save and Export. If we selected to Save it would give us a raw backup or template we could use without any starting rules attached, this might be what we need.

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SELECTED ANSWER
replied on January 29, 2024

I don't know if you can prevent the export from including the Starting Rule, but you're not required to bring the Starting Rule back in during the Workflow import.

When you're in the Starting Events part of the Workflow import, under "Action" for the rule select "Discard". The Starting Rule won't be imported with the Workflow and thus can't overwrite/modify any existing Rules.

We've just filed Cloud Workflow user story 507094 "I want to be warned when importing a starting event would disable an in-use starting rule" so hopefully in the future you'll get a heads up. Because Cloud starting rules and their support for many:one attachments work differently than self-hosted Workflow's 1:1 starting rules, it definitely makes sense to throw a warning in the import process if you're about to make a change that impacts existing workflows.

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replied on January 31, 2024

Oh I can discard the rule when I am importing (especially when copying workflows over and over), and obviously if it is ever imported into another Cloud system it can't access the rule in the source Cloud system. That helps, thank you.

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