plone.app.workflowmanager-overhaul 1.2a1

A workflow manager for Plone

Introduction

Note

Until some proper documentation is written for the new graphing interface, take a look at this youtube video to satiate your curiousity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qORLAIO7xBQ

This package provides a GUI for managing custom workflows in Plone.

This is the successor of uwosh.northstar’s workflow design tool (North* continues on as a file system product generator, given either a PloneFormGen or Dexterity prototype).

Features

• add/edit/delete new workflows

• add content rule actions easily for a workflow transition

• graph workflows

• easily manipulate workflow permissions

Graphing

The package also supports graphing workflows.

The inspiration for this piece was pretty much taken from DCWorkflowGraph.

In order to enable this feature, you’ll need to install the Graphviz library. Information can be found at http://www.graphviz.org

Once you’ve built Graphviz and have installed it, make sure the “dot” executable it creates is in your PATH, e.g.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

assuming “make install” placed the Graphviz executables into /usr/local/bin. You can test that your PATH is set correctly if “which dot” finds the “dot” executable.

Then restart your Zope or ZEO client. The next time you are looking at a custom workflow in Workflow Manager, you should see a new “Diagram” button. When you click on it, it generates a GIF depicting the workflow’s states and transitions.

You may get better results if your state and transition IDs do not include hyphens. Graphviz’ “dot” executable will issue warning messages that you can find in your instance log if it has trouble understanding the state and transition names and labels.

Plone 3 Support

You must also have simplejson installed.

Changelog

1.2a1 (2/12/2015)

• Rewrote back-end JS to be more predictable and flexible [obct537]

• AJAX calls now return “intelligent” feedback to tell the graph how to update itself to reflect changes. [obct537]

1.1a4 ~ unreleased

• Updated graph saving system to be far more efficient [obct537]

• Graph now updates dynamically whenever changes are saved. [obct537]

1.1a3 ~ unreleased

• Included Springy.js library [obct537]

• Numerous small changes to improve stability [obct537]

• Created “reorder” functionality using Springy.js to help ordering large, complex workflows much easier. [obct537]

1.1a2

• Included jsPlumb library. [obct537]

• Replaced previous UI with jsPlumb graph layout. [obct537]

• Removed older, redundant UI elements. Rewrote workflowmanager.js to be more dynamic, to accomodate jsPlumb [obct537]

1.0a5

• Instantiate transition scripts when we create a transition so definition.xml is well generated by Generic Setup. [thomasdesvenain]

• Added more strings classifiers and metadata items for this packages [macagua]

• Fix workflow, state and transition id generation when we have accents in titles. [thomasdesvenain]

• Full internationalization. French translation. [thomasdesvenain, macagua]

• Added Spanish translation. [hvelarde]

• double-quote state and transition names in graph view [erral]

• replace remaining ‘jq’ names by ‘jQuery’ in javascript for full Plone 4.3+ compatibility. [thomasdesvenain]

• Added Chinese Simplified translation. [Jian Aijun]

1.0a4 ~ 2012-05-28

• show acquired permission setting [vangheem]

• revamped styles based on bootstrap [vangheem]

1.0a3 - 2011-09-02

• cloned transition now sets display name to new title also. [vangheem]

• cancel on confirm save now prevents dialog from opening. [vangheem]

• fix error with changing source transitions if transitions are stored as a tuple or list. [vangheem]

1.0a2 - 2011-09-01

• Add MANIFEST.in. [WouterVH]

• use json library and just advertise that plone 3 users need to install simplejson [vangheem]

• Fix js to work correctly with all versions of jquery in selecting input tags correctly. [vangheem]

1.0a1 - 2010-12-12

• Initial release