Workflow Transitioning

Workflows consists of sequences of activities. Transitioning is the act of moving from one completed activity to the start of the next activity. After completing the final activity, a special transition  completes the workflow.

Visualisation in the Workflow Assistant

Transition Selection

Before a transition to a following activity can occur, transition selection needs to be made :

1. By default the name of a transition is the name of its next onward activity, but workflow can specify its own name to reflect different routes to the same activity. Here the transition is called "Return to Requester" but, as we will see below, the next activity is actually called "Change Management"
2. The wording on the submit button now shows that a transition will occur when it is pressed. It is possible for the next activity to automatically change the status of the ticket. If so the button wording will change to reflect this, for example "Submit and Transition to Pending"

After selecting a transition, the workflow may require some preliminary actions to be performed before submission, eg

• adding a comment
• selecting a group

For full details see Workflow Selecting Next Activities

Initiating the Transition

The selected transition is initiated by submitting the ticket. At this point the workflow assistant will enter a busy state whist the transition occurs :

Transitioning can take a few seconds depending on the complexity of the workflow. A successful transition then notifies the Workflow Assistant to redisplay itself on the new activity.

The "Return to Requester" transition has completed and the current activity is now "Change Management".

Behind the Scenes

The transition calculations are performed on our Cloudset servers. When the ticket is submitted all the usual Zendesk field updates are applied but a subsequent trigger notifies our server that a transition is required. The necessary checks and calculations are made and persisted state of the workflow for this ticket is updated. Finally a message is sent to the Workflow Assistant to query the latest state of the workflow (now on the new current activity) and to redisplay itself.