The page Creating and Editing a Workflow page explains the screens and steps that are used to create a Workflow in general.

This page will take you step by step through the creation of a Workflow. If you are having any trouble with the jargon used, check the Terminology page.

Scenario

We have a company that manages assets with annual inspections for each asset to check if maintenance is needed. When a new asset is purchased, such as a street news kiosk, an initial inspection must be done. If the asset is in good condition then nothing else needs to be done. If there are problems with the asset then a maintenance job is raised.

Step 1: Get Your Ideas Down

Before starting to create the Workflow in Gruntify, we suggest that you take a few moments to write down the main steps in the process. This allows you to clarify in your mind what needs to happen as well as share your ideas with your colleagues to check the overall process.

It doesn’t need to be complex. For example, the scenario described could be written.

• Rey buys a new park building.

• Alex goes and checks the building for structural issues, wiring that needs fixing, overall look and feel.

• Alex gives the report to Jim

• Jim checks and if everything is okay then he tells Rey all is good.

• If there is a problem, Jim gets his Tradies team out to fix out the new building and when all is good, he emails Rey with the okay.

Or if you are used to simple flowcharts you may draw:

Open

Step 2: What Is the Starting Point?

You will need to decide what sort of trigger you need to start this process. Is it the creation of an asset in Gruntify? Creation of a request? Creation of a job? Let someone start it rather than letting Gruntify start it automatically?

In the case of the example workflow, we could start it with a manual start and have the first step be “Create a New Asset”. Instead we will start with a Create Asset trigger, so that when whoever creates the new Asset record doesn’t need to remember to run the workflow - it will be run automatically.

It is not possible to swap a starting trigger for a different trigger after you have created the Workflow. Just about everything else can be changed but not the trigger type. So think about this carefully.

Step 3: Draft up the basics

When you have your initial ideas, go into Workflow Studio and start drafting up the workflow.

Gruntify won’t save an invalid workflow. So create your workflows in small, valid chunks. Do not draw up a big workflow with lots of connectors and then find you can’t save it as you don’t have time today to fill in the details. Just do a couple of boxes at a time, fill them in and let Gruntify save.

Watch the video below to see how we start creating the workflow.

Points to remember from the video:

• You can split the flow using an Exclusive Branch Connector (only one path taken) or a Parallel Branch Connector (all paths taken).

• Before an Exclusive Branch Connector, you will usually have either an Asset Creation, Request Status, or Job Status connector. This ensures that the data values that will be used for the testing will be valid. You don’t want to test the results of an Inspection before the Inspection is completed!

• To access a value in one node, the value must be listed on the output tab of a previous node.

Step 4: Change, Publish, Test, and Repeat

Once you have enough done you can test it, publish the design and test it using dummy data. Get a feeling for how it is working then you can go back and fix any issues and add more functionality.

We suggest that when you are ready to test a workflow, you do a quick run through the checklist first. This will help you pick up design issues that lead to the workflow doing unexpected things.

The following videos will show you the steps we went through to add functionality to our example workflow.

Points to remember from this video:

• To put an unchanging link in an email add an Email connector and add the URL details in the button fields.

• To put a link to an Asset, Job, or Request in an email, create a “Generate Link To …” node first and then add the Email connector. On the “Action Button Link” field change the field type from text to Parameter and select the newly generated link.

Points to remember from this video:

• You can split the flow using an Exclusive Branch Connector (only one path taken) based on almost any field in the user entered data for an Asset, Job, or Request. Using form data you can control more than two branches.

• Combining Exclusive Branching based on Form Data along with Parallel Branching can create a complex sequence of work based on an initial inspection.

Points to remember from this video:

• When defining the job, we define offsets for start and stop dates and Gruntify calculates the absolute dates when the job is created.

• Newly created jobs can be saved as Unassigned for manual updating or Queued ready to be picked up by a field team.

Points to remember from this video:

• Test all possible paths through the workflow.

• The results are found in the Instances view.

• Keep your test cases for next time.

Step 5: Trial, Review, Improve

Keep repeating this process until you have good enough to use it with some real-world users. We suggest that you try out it with a trial group of users to start with and check the outcomes via the Instances view.

If you find there are issues with the flow and want to stop it temporarily you can Disable the workflow, make the changes and then re-enable.

If you are making improvements to a workflow that is running okay, then can leave the workflow running while you work on the changes. Gruntify will autosave your changes, but the running version of the workflow will not be affected until you click Publish.

Points to remember from this video:

• Look out for issues when you start running it in Production. It could just be an odd behavior that a user notices.

• Any issues found? Analyze and fix.

Like to see more?

For another example workflow, see Sample Workflow Date Time Comparisons.

Related articles