Launch workflow from automation chain?

[donbauer1_]

I am hoping I am missing something obvious..

I have a document lifecycle defined. When a user submits a document, I want to automatically kick off a validation workflow to approve the document to move it to the next step in the lifecyle.

I can use Services->create task, however, I still must manually navigate to the workflow tab and start the workflow. I cannot seem to find anything in studio that would allow me to kick it off automatically? The task shows up properly with the proper user group, however, when the link is clicked, the workflow hasn't started.

The desired behavior would be for the document to be ready for approve / reject when the user clicks the link. Is this possible??

Don Bauer
/> CTO
/> KnowGov 501(c)3 non-profit

[Wojciech_Sulejm]

Why don't you use the Document > Follow Life Cycle Transition operation. If all you need is move the document to the next step in the lifecycle upon a user click, this should do the job.

[donbauer1_]

I am fine with that, can I create a link, send it in an email and when clicked would move a document along the lifecycle??

[Anahide_Tchertc · Accepted solution]

If you're fine with a looser validation process, you can read the documentation explaining how to make a task assignment to one or many users, it gives a complete example: the "one step validation workflow tutorial". As you can chose to launch another automation chain when users accept or reject the task, it makes it possible for you to mix quite a variety of operations, including changing the document lifecycle state, sending emails,... see the reference documentation.

Launching a parallel or validation workflow is not possible out of the box using operations available by default in Studio, but further improvements are on the way via content routing features integration, see the blog entry http://dev.blogs.nuxeo.com/2011/12/content-routing-an-alternative-to-jbpm.html

[Alain_ESCAFFRE]

Yes, Donbauer1, you can create a handler bound to "on create" event and in the related automation chain, you can use the "createTask" operation, as in the sample ANahide pointed. Not that in the automation chains called if user accepted or rejected, you can also re-use create task, which enables to follow a multiple steps workflow, if required.

[Salmen11]

Yeah, what you’re seeing is usually the difference between creating a workflow task and actually instantiating the workflow process itself. Creating the task alone won’t automatically start the approval workflow unless there’s an explicit trigger/action tied to the lifecycle transition.

In most setups, the workflow has to be launched either:

through a lifecycle state action,
an event handler/listener,
or a custom automation operation tied to document submission.

The reason users land on an empty workflow tab is because the workflow instance hasn’t been created yet — only the task metadata exists.

I’d check whether your platform supports automatic workflow initiation on state transition or document creation events. In a lot of enterprise systems, this ends up being solved with external orchestration tools or APIs instead of pure Studio configuration. We actually did something similar recently to integrate claude into approval pipelines so documents could be pre-validated automatically before human review even started.

But for your core issue: yes, it should be possible — you’re just missing the actual workflow start trigger, not the task assignment part.