Question

Photo of Jeremy Turgeon

0

Workflow Delay in Action

2

This seems like a simple action. It delays the workflow from proceeding to the next action. But for some reason, I can't seem to wrap my head around how to get it to work. 

I'm trying to create a support ticket system where the end user can come back and update the request later. Since any entry form the user has access to shows up immediately, I'm trying to put a delay in between them.

So, after they submit the initial request, it activates the support tech's end of things AND a new activity called 'Delay'. This simply delays for 1 minute and then moves on to allow the user to see the entry form again (a new activity called 'Update').

But the delay action never finishes so the Update activity is never seen. I've tried putting the delay action at the beginning of the Update activity and it just immediately makes the entry form available to the user without any delay.

  • Photo of Tyler Schrock

    1

    One thing to keep in mind is that while you might have set the delay to only one minute, It will still have to wait until the 'Process Workflows' job runs before it'll update. So, for example, if you have that job set to run every half hour, it might take up to 30 minutes for the delay to finish.

  • Photo of Michael Garrison

    0

    Jeremy,

    In general people can only see forms within activities assigned to them (but see the end of this post for a word on Rock Admins).

    So if you assign an activity to the tech group, a regular staff person (the submitter) should not be able to see the tech group's form. So I think that if you had the initial request form activate two activities- one with the tech group's form and the other with an "update request" form, your user would only see the second one. Since I haven't tried it I'll mention that it's POSSIBLE that you'll need to "Assign" the second activity to the requester, but I don't think so, since they'll have the link into the workflow as the requester.

    I haven't tried creating an "update" form for the requester, but based on my experience in creating a workflow which activates 5 different activities (each with a different form) and assigns each to a different group, it should work that way.

    Note however that Rock Admins (by default, as well as anyone else with Edit rights on the workflow type) can see all the activities, and so they would always only see the form from the first activity. To fix that, the "Workflow Entry" block must be set to "Deny" admins Edit rights on the block, and the workflow type itself must deny them edit rights as well. You may need to create a separate Workflow page with that first condition met so that you aren't having unintended consequences on other workflow types as well... 

    • Michael Garrison

      Michael Garrison

      I know this answer doesn't deal with the "Delay" action at all, as I'm not actually sure how that works. But hopefully it does get you to what you're trying to accomplish, nevertheless.

      • Jeremy Turgeon

        Jeremy Turgeon

        Adding a user entry from assumes the requester has access and displays without requiring it to be assigned to them. But getting it to delay just don't work as expected. Hence, the problem.