Terminology

In this chapter, you can find a short illustration of the most important terms used for the management of workflows.

 

Workflow

A workflow is a sequence of operations that represents the process steps of a ticket or task. The Workflow Management allows for configuring when the status of a ticket is to change or when history entries are to be added, for example.

There are different workflow types which are used for a better distinction of workflows. Workflows can be selected at various points in the application. For instance, an individually created workflow can be used for every ticket or process schema. In order to only display the usable workflows at the respective points, workflow types can be marked to prevent the display of work-flows where they cannot be used. Moreover, various plug-ins can only be used in certain workflow types and thus will only be displayed in the corresponding categories.

 

Plug-in

A plug-in signifies a single activity within a workflow. Physically, it is represented by a DLL and a corresponding XML In computing, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable through use of tags that can be created and defined by users. configuration document. In the Workflow Designer, it is displayed as an icon, e.g. the icon Status change:

The combination of plug-ins step by step leads to a workflow. In order to maintain an overview, the plug-ins (and thus the single activities) in the Workflow Designer are divided into various categories.

 

Workflow Item

There is a difference between a ticket/task and a workflow item Reference object e.g. to a ticket or CI that runs through the workflow.. From the user’s perspective, the ticket or the task runs through the workflow, which is not fully correct. For a passage through the workflow, a specific item, the so-called Workflow Item, is generated. This item has specific characteristics and is necessary for making the workflow more flexible. Thus, only the workflow item runs through the workflow, not the ticket or task itself.

It is possible for every ticket or task to have multiple workflow items, which can run through several workflows at the same time. This document uses these terms interchangeably.

 

Priorities

Workflow items can be assigned different priorities by the Workflow Manager. Depending on the assigned priority, they are processed differently as soon as several workflow items are in a plug-in.

The priority of a workflow item is then recalculated after each step in the workflow. Thus, the priority of an item automatically decreases as soon as it causes errors in a plug-in. Simultaneously, the priority increases, e.g. a user has performed a workflow activity.

There are four different priorities:

• Low: The lowest priority. A workflow item is obtained by the plug-in Set processing priority or if it has produced too many errors/exceptions in the workflow.
• Normal: This is the normal priority, which each workflow item is assigned at the beginning.
• High: This priority can only be assigned by the Set processing priority plug-in.
• UI: This priority is assigned to a workflow item as soon as it has been triggered by a workflow activity (for example, by activity Acceptance).