Simple Workflow - Overwrite Content Problem

[peterstb]

Hi All,

I've recently been playing around with the simple workflow rules, in the Alfresco Explorer.

I'm trying to simulate an experience where a user will open a piece of content, in a "DRAFT" space, using the "edit online" feature.  Once they are satisfied with their changes, they will click on the icon with the green checkbox ("done editing").  I have a simple workflow rule that will look for "updated" content, that does NOT have "(Working Copy)" in its name.  This rule will copy that content to a "REVIEW" folder.  The "REVIEW" folder has a rule to email a reviewer, and another rule to allow for simple workflow, which has an approve and reject step.  The approve step will move the content to the "PROD" folder and the reject step will move the content to a "REJECT" folder.

The challenge I have, is that when attempting to move content to the "PROD" folder, I get an error indicating the content with that name already exists.  Interesting thing is, I don't get that error message when the rule to copy content from "DRAFTS" to "REVIEW" gets fired, and there is already a piece of content in "REVIEW" folder with the same name???  I thought it might be a copy vs. move issue, but when I changed the rule to a copy, it still didn't work.

Is there something obvious I'm overlooking?  This seems like a pretty reasonable workflow to try and implement.  I do want to have the overwrite behavior work, as for my use case, it makes sense to overwrite existing content.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

BTW - I've seen information on custom content and custom workflows in Jeff Potts articles, and those look good, but I'm trying to explor simple capabilities out of the box to begin with.  I'm not ready to branch off an start writing custom code to extend the Alfresco mode.  The fact that an overwrite works in one case and not the other leads me to believe that it's possible, and I just don't understand the rules that allow it to happen.

Thanks and best regards,
Todd Peterson

[richard_im]

There's a couple of ways you can approach this:
1) Rethink your rules - Ultimately, if something is deemed published/public/approved/etc, one would essentially want to work off that document so, from a end user training perspective, they should perform a 'Check Out' of the document and perform the checkout to the draft folder.  The draft folder would still have a rule to then move to Review.  The difference is the rule in 'PROD' would need to check-in the doc (which is an available action).

2) Leaving things the way they are, you can apply a rule to 'Execute a Script' in the 'PROD' space.  The script should essentially check to see if a doc with that name exists - if it does, update the content, if it doesn't create net new.