Ability to Clone a workflow to apply to another class
It would be great if there was the ability to clone a workflow so it could be applied to another class. Since there are notification and permission settings that can be applied to each workflow state, an overall workflow can be quite involved.
In our scenario we have well over a dozen different types of document classes, but they all might have the same approval workflow. It would help promote consistency in settings between classes if I could clone a workflow. It would also save an incredible amount of time.
Comments
Fully agree, and likewise it would be helpful to be able to clone a step in a workflow. The default notifications tick boxes and action / notifications messages customization need to be done for every step, which is quite long especially since saving is required between every step.
Hi Thibault,
I like the idea of both having templates for workflow and also the ability to clone a class along with its workflow. Both of these features would be of interest to us.
+1! For my customer I had to replicate a workflow except one step. Thus I had to redo the whole workflow + notifications + permissions which takes almost a day of work!!!
While I could have just copied it and then change one step.
Hello,
In addition to duplicating just workflows, I find many times I am duplicating effort when creating document classes/workflows/library security that tend to be the same or very similar.
Feature Suggestion: An option to duplicate a document class/workflow/security as done in Views (where a view can be cloned) such as Clone Document Class or Clone Workflow would be very helpful to library administrators.
Many thanks.
Hello Matthew and Nicolas,
Thank you for your post and comment, it is already quite popular.
I wanted to point out some pretty hard limitations that workflow cloning can bring.
Any workflow interaction that is bound to a document property like automatic transition based on the value of a property, or the access to the document based on the workflow state and the content of a person field.
If the destination class, where you want to clone the workflow, does not have the exact same properties, the cloned workflow will be unusable without extensive reconfiguration.
Other elements like email notification with specific placeholders might not work as well following the cloning.
We were discussing internally the possibility to bring templates of workflow (at the library level or domain level) or the possibility to clone a class (with its associated workflow). Let us know what you think.
From my experience it is always further more time saving copying a complex workflow and changing just few things than re-building the whole workflow from the beginning.
Sometimes you need to make changes to the workflow or make trials, but you don't want to loose the current one, you never know if in the future you may need to restore the previouse workflow.
When duplicating the workflow, it would be useful to be able to select (through checkboxes) which workflow features have to be duplicated ....
E.g.:
What do you want to duplicate?
[ ] States
[ ] Permissions
[ ] Notifications
[ ] Custom Actions for States
[ ] Display options
[ ] All
Target Class for duplicated workflow:
[ ] Same Class, make duplicated workflow default
[ ] Other Class
Menu field ( select here )
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