Table of Contents
Overview
How They Work
Workflow Glossary
Visualizing Your Workflow
Workflow History
Requests/Proposals Actions
Invalid Users
Related Articles
Overview
Workflows allow requests or proposals to be routed to the right person(s) for approval. As an example, in Academic Scheduling, workflows are commonly used to route requests for section changes or rule exceptions to the Registrar’s Office for approval.
How They Work
There are many possible outcomes depending on the setup, but to demonstrate workflows on a high level, we’ll use a simple, three-step Rule Exception Request workflow as an example.
Step One: A Department Scheduler submits a rule exception request, which will be routed through a workflow.
Step Two: Through a workflow, this request is then routed to the appropriate person, who can see it inside of their requests dashboard.
Step Three: The workflow approver (Registrar in this case) marks the request as “approved”.
Workflow Glossary
Before we discuss how to create a workflow, it is first necessary to define some key terms.
Author
The “Author” of a workflow is the initial person that initiates a request which can be routed to the first step in the workflow.
Logic Jump
Conditions that can be used to dynamically change the path of a request.
Participant(s)
Participants are the people that will be involved in the workflow at any given step.
Steps
A workflow contains “Steps”, which define the rules by which a set of people can make an approval, and what happens when they make or reject the request.
Visualizing Your Workflow
If you would like to visualize your workflow, you can click the “Graph” button. This will allow you to visualize the full path, from request to approval, through the workflow.
For workflows with specified logic jumps, the graph provides a text-based overview of all implemented logic jumps. It additionally will alert the user of any circular logic jumps that will result in the request never being approved.
Workflow History
Select “history” to view all requests that have used this workflow in the past.
Requests/Proposals Actions
Voting
If a user has a decision permission, when the proposal is in their workflow step, they will be able to vote on the request/proposal.
Display
The user's decision will display throughout the application, with the decision’s icon, icon color, and decision name.
The requests/proposal dashboard will also display the icon and name of decisions, if users voted for the decision at that step.
Activity Log
The activity log reflects user votes, and displays the name of the decision the user voted for.
To view the activity log, go to: Product > Requests/Proposals > (Open Request) < Activity (Under “Proposal Toolbox”).
Invalid Users
If a user is deleted or inactivated in Coursedog, make sure you remove them from the workflow (and replace them with someone else).
To check for invalid users, click the “Reports” button in the top-right corner of the workflows page in any product.
