Rock U - Workflows - Components of a Workflow

Transcribed Video Content

Workflows stop feeling confusing after you learn their four parts. Those parts are workflow types, activities, actions, and attributes. We'll talk about each of those in this video and then hopefully workflows will sound simple to you. So let's cover some of the components. Now this is a simple view of the components. There is an overarching workflow type. That's the workflow itself. And workflow types will have multiple activities in them. And an activity will be made up of multiple actions that could be something send an email, assign an activity to a person, or set a person attribute. Now, because there's multiple sets of activities, this is how it looks. Multiple actions will be completed in a row. And once those are completed, the activity will be done. And then you can move on to the next activity. And activities may have many actions, they could even have just a single action, and there are lots of important actions that you want to know about. But first of all, we'll cover attributes. So there are two different types on a workflow. There's a workflow attribute, which it will live for the whole workflow. So it's gonna be set once and every activity will read or write the same value. So it's important to use this when you have data that's only needed once the requester or a topic, and that will live through every activity. But for activity attributes, each time an activity runs, this attribute will reset. So if you want an empty value every time one activity runs, an activity that repeats multiple times if an approval can be sent back and forth, and you want different notes each time you use an activity, then you would use an activity attribute instead. Now here are some pretty important actions. There's so many dozens and dozens of actions you can use in a workflow, but a lot of these are fundamental such as activating an activity, completing one, completing the entire workflow based off of an action, you can do that. So you can get really specific about, what activity runs under what conditions, then you can assign an activity to a person, a group, or you can add person to a specified group. You can set a person attribute. You'll do that pretty often. Then you can add person notes, tags. You can straight up send emails through a workflow, you can do user entry, meaning it will look for a person in your database or even create a new one based on some information you get in the workflow, And you can also change the workflow name. Workflow types, activities, actions, and attributes are the four bits of vocabulary you need to know for a workflow. From now on, everything else about learning workflows should feel simpler.