Free Kintana Tools - Workflow Step Sequencing

ZDS

Free Kintana Tools

If you want your users to see request statuses and package steps listed in an order that follows the sequence of events in the workflow then you need to sequence your workflow steps.

By default, new steps get added with the next available sequence number. When you complete a new workflow design the steps are likely to be in more or less random order. New steps added to an existing workflow will list at the end.

Either way this is probably not what you want, and if you have inherited workflows with many steps re-sequencing is a chore that can get overlooked, particularly if your workflow has several hundred steps...

This tool may help

Each workflow step has a sequence number between 1 and the total number of workflow steps.

The information is stored in the SORT_ORDER field of the KWFL_WORKFLOW_STEPS table.

The sequence number controls the display order on Request and Package status tabs.

For Deliver package lines the steps run horizontally:

For Demand requests the steps run vertically:

When you use the arrow keys on the 'Step Sequence' tab to move steps into the sequence you want you will get the popup dialog 'The current workflow is already in use. Any changes may result in data loss. (KWFL-30077)'.

You can disregard this. Changing the step sequence is NOT a problem and can be done at any time without fear of invalidating data integrity. All you're going to change is the order in which the steps are displayed on the package and request status tabs

Generally speaking you want the sequence to follow the temporal order of events. However, as workflows usually contain loopbacks there's no one way to do this.

Popular strategies are:

Sequence the steps, starting with the start step and ending with the 'close success' step, including only the steps on the shortest path between them that would get executed if everything goes perfectly. Then list all the other (exception handling) steps after that. This approach works best if you have a small total number of steps - say up to 15

Sequence the steps starting with the start step and ending with the 'close success' step, and including every step between, assigning sequence numbers so that as far as possible, whatever path you take, as long as you are moving forward the numbers increase. This approach works best for workflows with large numbers of steps. The tool takes this approach and tries to come up with sequence numbers that increase overall from start to end.

The bad news is that doing this is theoretically impossible unless you are trying to number what are technically known as directed acyclic graphs. Unfortunately any non trivial Kintana workflow is very definitely cyclic.

However we're not going to let this little issue of non-computability become a problem.

Only 1834 lines of 'c' code later we have worked through five test workflows, and a whole bunch of hours.

Here's the prize before-and-after test workflow.

Notice how sliding step 2 backwards and forwards changes one's ideas of precedence!

I've designated the tool as a toy because it's not and can't be perfect since it's trying to compute the incomputable.

On the other paw it seems to work to a reasonable extent, and as a bonus i've thrown in a few best practice checks for steps in your workflows that may be orphaned but not disabled.

1. Run the sql in the zip file on your workflow, and save the result set to a text file.

2. Run the kntawfseq utility in the zip file in a command window giving it the result file as a parameter, and the start and end step numbers.

3. The tool writes to the display, and also to a hard copy kntawfseq.txt file for reference.

Enjoy