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Workflow Newbie needs help!

Former Member
Former Member
I'm pretty new to M-Files and have never implemented a workflow before. I need some advice.

I understand that workflow is just a set of states with some rules about which states can move to which other states, and a set of actions that are to be performed upon a state transition (e.g. email notifications etc).

I have the situation where a document may be entered into the M-Files vault by a sales guy. It will go in as "not approved" or some such status. Then the document will need to be approved by 3 other people (e.g. from the Finance, Commercial and Operations departments). These representatives need to be selected on a case-by-case basis, but will be other M-files users, most likely on concurrent licenses. Finally, the document will be approved and ready to be accepted finally into the repository by me (or one of my admin colleagues).

Can anyone give me the basic pointers to the best way to resolve the issue about selecting the three "approvers"? They are not always fixed and will need to be entered manually according to some big list of approvers I have on my desk (the list, not the approvers :)).

I imagine the sales guy dropping in the new doc, at which point pops up a custom dialog saying "enter Finance approver" etc and when he presses "ok", it enters the "awaiting finance approval" state and sends a notification to finance etc.

is something like this possible?

cheers
Dom
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  • Former Member
    Former Member
    Hi.. I've been doing some more investigation and have answered some of my own questions.

    1) I realised this whilst in the shower this morning.
    2) I found the global notification settings to switch on notifications and correctly configured the email server.
    3) I realised that you could set permissions for state transitions, but I was trying to add a check that the state can only be changed if the current user = the guy who was assigned as the approver. I have done this as a post-condition of the state change. I couldn't do this before because I had the "approver" property in the class as a text field rather than a drop-down list of users - this meant I wasn't able to set the post-condition.

    I now only have one (new) issue remaining:

    1) Currently I have two sets of users - those with readonly access and those with additional rights for admin purposes. I need to add another set for those people who will be part of the workflow i.e. the approvers. I want to set their permissions such that these approvers can only add documents of one specific class type to the vault - we don't want them adding any other kind of documents.

    Can you give any tips on how to do this? I'll continue hunting (and reading the manual :))

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  • Former Member
    Former Member
    Hi.. I've been doing some more investigation and have answered some of my own questions.

    1) I realised this whilst in the shower this morning.
    2) I found the global notification settings to switch on notifications and correctly configured the email server.
    3) I realised that you could set permissions for state transitions, but I was trying to add a check that the state can only be changed if the current user = the guy who was assigned as the approver. I have done this as a post-condition of the state change. I couldn't do this before because I had the "approver" property in the class as a text field rather than a drop-down list of users - this meant I wasn't able to set the post-condition.

    I now only have one (new) issue remaining:

    1) Currently I have two sets of users - those with readonly access and those with additional rights for admin purposes. I need to add another set for those people who will be part of the workflow i.e. the approvers. I want to set their permissions such that these approvers can only add documents of one specific class type to the vault - we don't want them adding any other kind of documents.

    Can you give any tips on how to do this? I'll continue hunting (and reading the manual :))

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