nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Workflow Best Practice

frogman

Hi

I am very new to Teamsite so please bare with me!

We have a simple workflow for submitting content:

Create Content --> Generate Pages --> Set Metadata --> Deploy

Pretty standard stuff I think. However, for various internal reasons we have a seperate navigation paradigm, built via a Teamsite template and resultant DCR. This means that we have to insert an additional user task into the workflow which is to edit the navigation DCR when new content is to be added thus:

Create Content --> Generate Pages --> Set Metadata --> Update Navigation --> Deploy

I therefore need to attach the navigation DCR to the Update Navigation task but am having problems. Teamsite tells me that I cannot attach files to the task because it not a start task.

What's the best practice here? wfTask? externalTask?

AAAGA.

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Comments

Adam Stoller

There are a number of ways you could do this - but it largely depends upon the full knowledge of your working process (for instance - right now, as stated, your workflows don't submit any of the files to staging!) How much of the process development process do you drive through the workflow vs. how much of your development process drives the use of the workflow? What is the relationship between the first DCR that's being processed by this workflow and the second DCR that contains the navigational components? Are they in the same directory [doubtful], or the same branch? If not, then you will pretty much definitely need a wftask. If they are in the same branch - then an externaltask would probably work unless you can determine the path/name of the navigational DCR at the time that you're processing the files to attach to the workflow when it is first instantiated.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

frogman

Hi Ghoti,

Thanks for the very prompt response!

As you rightly point out, I left one crucial element out of the workflow. It actually flows:

Create Content --> Generate Pages --> Set Metadata --> Submit --> Deploy

So, the desired workflow is:

Create Content --> Generate Pages --> Set Metadata --> Update Navigation --> Submit --> Deploy

The navigation DCR is in the same branch as the DCR being processed. I have now used an external task with a Variable element that passes the path to the navigation DCR as a string. I then use the external task to attach that file to the workflow. That all seems to work OK.

As I am learning on the fly, I don't want to get into bad habits! The reason I have had to do it this way is because I cannot add a <files> element to the external task because it is not a start task. I'm assuming that this is by design to stop files being attached to workflows by some 'backdoor' method.

Is this good practice?

Adam Stoller

Using the externaltask too add files to a task after the workflow has been instantiated is fairly common practice - but what has me confused here is that if you can determine the file to add at the time the workflow is being instantiated - you could add it to the start-task so that there would be two files attached to the workflow from the get-go -- otherwise the idea of having a <files> element on any other task specification in the workflow doesn't really make sense unless you just wanted to avoid having the user see the navigation dcr until after the other dcr was finished being processed?

However, all that rambling aside, yes - you're doing it right by using the externaltask script.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

frogman

Thanks for that Ghoti,

You have pointed me in the right direction with your "rambling" :-) As you point out, the simple way is to attach all the files up front in my start task.

I'm getting there....

frogman

OK, the problem now is that I have all the files attached up front: a DCR, the generated HTML file, and an xml file for use by a usertask further on in the workflow. I now want to use a cgitask to get the user to review and update Metadata via Metatagger. How do I tell the cgi task that I only want it to process the generated HTML file?