The eventscript displays the start step even though it is set to not display

We would like to achieve some validations before initiating a certain workflow (validations on/of attributes on a documents category). Our plan was to put this validation and error messages in an eventscript, and place that eventscript on the workflows "Workflow is initiated".

However, the workflow in question has the start step set to not display (and so we want it to remain). And when we run some test we can see that when we click on "initiate workflow" and the validation detects anomality and wants to give an error message - the start step is displayed - but no error message. When you then click on "initiate" in the start step, then the error message is displayed.

Does this mean that we have to do the validation in oscript "outside" the workflow (We were planning on creating a dedicated choice on the function menu to initiate this particular workflow)? Does any of you have experience of this situation?

Regards,

Nina Lewau

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HFCDev

Quoted Nina Lewau on 09/06/2016 10:22 AM:

Hi Nina,

I attempted to reproduce this. When I wrote an event script that invokes on WF initiation, I was able to get it to stop in its tracks. However, all I got was the generic "[Could not start workflow. An error occured starting the workflow]" and not the error message I specified.

I traced this and what happens is when you start your workflow, it calls the WAPI.StartWorkflow() built-in method, and it calls any event scripts via callbacks - a bit asynchronous. Unfortunately, any error message you return in your event script is largely ignored (the APIError object is returned, but not used as near as I can figure). The error message is returned by setting the retVal of your script to an assoc with an OK flag and an errMsg string - the OK being the most important - if it's otherwise left Undefined (default), the event script is interpreted the same as an Assoc with OK = TRUE.

As for why your WF is being diverted to the WF init page, it may be due to some required attributes not being filled out at init time. If there are any require attributes, you would need to specify defaults if you want to initiate this way. Having said that, if you are seeing it bypass the start step when your event script is returning TRUE, then something else must be at play, but at this point, I can't reproduce it.

-Hugh Ferguson

Hugh Ferguson Consulting Ltd.

Appu_Nair1

From your postings earlier I have noticed that you need to use the ESIGN WF from OT to do a lot of your work.I do very little with it so I do not really know its capabilities/limitation.However I would have attempted your project kind of like this

Your Function menu could invoke a RH page which can call a configured webform based of a template or even any HTML weblingo output.As a matter of fact I always design my own weblingo so I get more contril.I create a template and steal all the place holders etc and then make it my weblingo output as a baseline.
The submit of the form could be the code to invoke your workflow either a form initaiting a workflow or your weblingo initiating a workflow.
If the WF cannot be started LL will throw a fit I am pretty sure you could trap this to show as a error message to your users.I am thinking you ahve tried this but does not work.

Another thought is OT offers OOB to validate if required attributes are set in the WF perhaps you don't like that feature? One of our good friends Chris Meyer has done a remarkable way of OOP'ing Oscript and it will help you if you care to discuss your requirements with him.Another very dependable product is Patrick Vitali's I have not seen a more user friendly RAD tool for BPM process development in LL all these years.All of these products have extraordinary Oscript support and they know the innards of Oscript than many in the field so that is why it all looks very easy.Forum replies can only go so far as pro bono things have limitations.