Status Management and 'Wait' step

[David Trant]

Do the e-mails get sent regardless of whether the status is changed inside or outside the workflow?  If so, perhaps you can put the e-mails into a second workflow triggered by the status change.  Alternatively, perhaps you can just re-arrange your existing workflow to have your parallel branch waiting for the event re-join the rest of the workflow prior to the e-mails being sent.  Of course, if you don't want the e-mails sent when the release occurs outside workflow, then this won't help.  In that case, maybe you can still have your parallel branch rejoin prior to the e-mails, but set a flag in each branch indicating which path was taken and check the flag to decide whether to send the e-mails.

 

Good luck,

David
 


To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: Status Management and 'Wait' step
From: cristiana.dagosto at au1.ibm.com
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:49:59 +1000


Hi all, 

we are on ECC 6.0 and using an add-on (Vistex) to handle all sorts of rebates and agreements. 

There are 3 possible status for an agreement: Blocked, Ready for Review and Released. 

When the user is ready to send the agreement for approval, he/she manually changes the status from Blocked to Ready for Review. Status Management has been configured so this change in status publishes the event 'approvalstarted', thereby triggering the workflow. So far, no worries, all is working fine. 

There are 2 levels of approval. Once all the approvers have approved the agreement, the workflow sets the status of the agreement to 'Released'. Once that has successfully happened, a few emails are sent. 

Everything is working fine. 

The problem I am having is when the agreement is manually set to 'Released', outside the workflow. If that happens, I would like to terminate the workflow instance as it is no longer relevant. I have put a wait step in a fork and I created a new entry in the Status Management that publishes the event 'approved' when the status is changed from 'Ready for Review' to 'Released'. 

The problem with that is that regardless of how the status is set to 'Released' i.e. outside the workflow or inside the workflow, the workflow gets terminated. If the status is set to 'Released' inside the workflow, I need to send an email to the initiator and to Finance, but the workflow gets terminated before I can send the emails. 

I could set the steps to send the email to happen before the background step that set the status of the agreement to 'Released', but I do not believe this is good practice? 

Any suggestions in how can I terminate the workflow when the status of the agreement is manually changed outside the workflow? 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions, 

Kind regards,

Cristiana
_________________________________
Cristiana d'Agosto
IBM Global Business Services
Mobile:  +61 417 927 224
cristiana.dagosto at au1.ibm.com
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