Forms and Workflow Configuration Overview

Forms represent a way to capture details of an entity that is to be tracked in the tool. Workflows are a digitised representation of the governance path or lifecycle of the entity once it is created. For example a holiday request form collects details of the person requesting the holiday and the dates being requested. The associated workflow defines the lifecycle of the request following submission which in this case would typically include an approval step.

All forms have an associated workflow and workflows are always associated with a form. Workflows support automatic branching so it is possible to configure distinct pathways depending on the value of an attribute in the form. 

The form and the workflow are collectively known as a Process Template in the platform.

A process template defines the business rules in relation to the data entity being modelled. This includes:

• 1. The attributes on the form. 

  2. What values those attributes can contain for example, dates, text, lists of values

  3. The possible form states, for example 'Awaiting Approval' and 'Approved'.

  4. In which form states the attributes are visible and editable. For example once a form is approved, it may be desirable to prevent further updates.

  5. Who can create, view and edit forms

  6. Whether forms should be included in search criteria

  7. What the governance steps are during the form's lifecycle, for example an approval step.

  8. What possible decisions are being made at each governance step, for example an approval step might have: 'Approve' and 'Reject'

  9. Who can act on the governance steps

• Process templates are created from the Process Templates Dashboard. 

• This page can be accessed from the Configuration Workbench. From the menu, select Config Workbench under the Administration section.

• From the configuration workbench, select Process Templates from the Forms and Workflow section.

• The Process Template Editor includes an attribute Show in Create? which can be used to prevent end users from creating forms using this template whilst it is in development.

• Check this box once the template is ready for use.

• The Access tab in the editor can also be used to limit access to the template to selected end users or groups. This can be used for example when testing a process template where there isn't a separate testing environment.

• When creating and editing process templates it is possible to include help text for fields on the form. This will help end users when completing and editing forms and potentially improve rates of adoption. 

• Refer to the section Adding Fields in the Process Template Editor configuration guide.

• Click on an existing process template in the Process Templates Dashboard to open and edit it in the Process Template Editor 

• If your organisation or team has separate environments for development and testing, process templates can be developed and tested in a separate environment and then migrated to the Production environment when ready.

• Refer to Configuration Migration Overview for further details.

• Process templates can be deleted, provided there are no forms using that template and the process template is a custom configured template rather than a system entity. System entities are ones which form part of a standard template to customers of The Anywhere Platform.

• If forms do exist they should first be deleted as described in the forms and workflow end user help 

• Navigate to the Process Templates Dashboard and then click on an existing process template to view the Process Template Editor 

• From the drop-down menu next to the 'Save' button select Delete.

• Process templates can be created as a copy of an existing one. There are a number of benefits to this:

  1. It is often a quicker way to configure and roll-out a new template to end-users.

  2. It ensures that the two templates have common field tokens and storage attributes. This can be helpful if reporting across multiple process templates and can be useful when workflows generate new forms from existing ones as the data can be automatically copied during creation. Such an example is where a risk materializes and an issue is generated automatically by the workflow.

• Navigate to the Process Templates Dashboard and then click on the existing process template that is to be copied.

• In the Process Template Editor open the drop-down menu next to the 'Save' button and select Copy.

• Although workflows and forms are part of a process template, workflow configuration is largely covered in the separate Workflow Configuration guide.