Workflow Creation: General Information

The process of creating a workflow does not require coding. Instead, you can use pages of the Customization Project Editor, which make it easy to work with the workflow and its components.

Before you can add a workflow, the screen corresponding to the form must be added to the list of customized screens on the Customized Screens page. To define a workflow, you use the pages organized under the Screens node in the navigation pane of the Customization Project Editor for a particular form. See Workflow Creation: Pages for Managing Workflows for details on the pages you will use to create and edit the workflow.

Tip: The term screen is generally used to describe what you are creating or customizing in the Customization Project Editor. This term distinguishes the entity you work with here from the form that will be used in MYOB Advanced. However, a form and its corresponding screen are essentially the same thing.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn how to use the Workflow (Tree View) page, and how to create a workflow from scratch.

Applicable Scenarios

You create a workflow when you need to implement a custom business process for an MYOB Advanced form and the form you want to customize does not have any workflow, or the existing workflow of the form does not fit your business processes.

Creation of a Workflow for a Form

When you define a workflow for a particular form, you need to do the following:

  1. Determine all possible states of the record that users work with on the particular form, and define those that do not already exist.
  2. For each state, add all actions that can be performed with a record in this state and all transitions associated with each action.
  3. Optional: If when an action is invoked, a user has to provide additional information for the record to transition to a different state, define the dialog boxes that contain the UI elements whose settings should be specified.
  4. Optional: If some modifications to the form elements (in terms of their appearance, usability, and requirement) are needed, specify which UI elements on the applicable form are shown, enabled, and required for each state of the workflow.
  5. Optional: If some modifications to the form actions are needed, specify which actions on the applicable form should have connotations and should be duplicated on the form toolbar (in addition to being shown on the More menu) for each state of the workflow.
  6. Optional: If the values of certain fields should be updated after a transition, add new values for the fields.
  7. Optional: If some modifications to the form fields are needed when the record enters a particular state or when it leaves it, add new values for these fields.
  8. Optional: If certain states have similar properties or can be skipped under certain conditions, add these states to a composite state (for details, see Composite States: General Information).

Creation of Multiple Workflows for a Form

You can add multiple workflows for a particular form. In this case, each workflow is applied to all entities that have a specific value in a particular field, which can thus be described as a workflow-identifying field because its value determines the workflow to be used.

For example, for opportunities on the Opportunities (CR304000) form, one workflow can be applied to opportunities for which one opportunity class is selected, and another workflow can be applied to opportunities for which another class is selected.

For details on creating or customizing a workflow with workflow-identifying field, see Workflow-Identifying Fields: General Information.

Development of Workflows in an Extension Library

You can develop and customize workflows not only in the Customization Project Editor but also in Visual Studio by using an extension library. To develop workflows, you should use Workflow API, which is a part of MYOB Advanced Framework. For details, see Workflow API Guide.