adding filelist to dummytask

tobias

Using TS 5.5.2 on NT:
I want an email notification task to run directly when the author user hits the "Submit" button, sending a mail to the approver.
If I use the <externaltask> element to send the mail and this task is the first task in my workflow I have the problem that the filelist of attached files comes after the <command> tag, so that at the point when the mail gets sent the attached files are still unknown to the task.
So, I added a <dummytask> as first task of the workflow (with a timeout of 0) whose only purpose is to get the filelist and then invoke the email notification task as successor. This results in the error message:
Invalid workflow:
ERROR: Could not add files to task DummyStart
ERROR: \none is not a valid area
ERROR: 02007: No workarea found

The debug output of the <dummytask> looks like this:
<dummytask name="DummyStart"
owner = "authoruser"
start = "t"
readonly = "f"
description = "reads file list and invokes email notification">
<timeout v="+000000">
<succ v="NotifyApprover"/>
</timeout>
<files>
<file path='\default\main\hamburg\rosi\WORKAREA\work/temp/img/01314001.jpg' comment='task file'/>
</files>
</dummytask>
Any ideas?

Adam Stoller

The fact that the files element appears after the command element within the task definition does not mean that the files won't be attached to the email (I just did some quick testing and verified this)

If you want to test it yourself - instead of using an email program for the command call a simple externaltask perl script that dumps the data to a file. Windows example:

#!iwperl
use TeamSite::WFtask;
# assuming no user-provided command line arguments
my($jobid, $taskid, $area) = (@ARGV);
my $task = new TeamSite::WFtask($taskid);
my @files = $task->GetFiles();
if (open(X, ">c:/temp/dbg.txt")){
   print X join("\n", @files), "\n";
   close(X);
}
$task->CallBack(0, "done");
exit(0);

Not being able to add files to a dummytask is correct (bug in the DTD that it mentions that - just filed #34450) - the reason is that the dummytask does not contain an areavpath element, and as such there is no path to base the list of files from.


--fish
(Interwoven, Curriculum Development)