Workflows User’s Guide JOBSCOPE ®

JOBSCOPE Workflows Copyright, Jobscope, LLC, 1996 - 2011 JOBSCOPE® Information in this document is subject to change without notice. Jobscope LLC makes no warranty of any kind regarding this material, and shall not be held liable for errors contained herein or for damages resulting from the use and performance of this material. The information in this document is protected by copyright. No part of this manual may be reproduced in any form without the expressed written consent of Jobscope LLC.

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Table of Contents

Workflows ..................................................................................................................................................... 2

Setting Up For Workflows ......................................................................................................................... 3

Enabling the Message Broker ............................................................................................................... 4

Creating the Workflow Service ............................................................................................................. 5

Creating the Actual Workflows ............................................................................................................. 9

Workflow Browse .................................................................................................................................... 10

Creating a New Job Workflow ................................................................................................................ 11

The Conditional Step ........................................................................................................................... 12

Sending an Email ................................................................................................................................. 15

Sending an Alert .................................................................................................................................. 20

Running a Report ................................................................................................................................ 22

Creating an Audit Workflow ................................................................................................................... 28

Creating a Workflow to Run VB.Net Code .............................................................................................. 29

Grouping in the Select Statement (Default) ........................................................................................... 33

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Workflows

The Workflow functionality is based on entering, changing, or deleting information in the database. It

allows you to do four things, send emails, send alerts, run reports and log table audits. A workflow

consists of a workflow header and one or more workflow steps. If a workflow has an audit step, it may

not have any other steps. If you want to send an alert and an email to a certain user when a new job is

received, then you would need two steps, one to send the alert and one to send the email.

There is another type of step that you may find useful, and that is a conditional step. A conditional step

defines whether the “child” steps for the conditional step should be executed. For example, if you only

want to send an email for a job greater than $5000. So if you wanted to send an alert and an email to a

certain user when a job over $5000 is entered, then you would need three steps, the conditional step,

then a child step for the alert, then a child step for the email. If you wanted to send an alert to an

additional three people, then you would need six steps.

Alerts are posted on the To Do List on the homepage of the user to which the alert is sent. A service

runs every five minutes to refresh the homepage. The homepage also refreshes when it is opened, so

logging off and back on will show you the latest alerts.

The purpose of an audit workflow is to record when a record in a database table is created, changed, or

deleted. An audit workflow has only one step, and that step is an Audit step. If the audit is for the

Vendor Master, IPVENDM, the audit data will be stored in table IPVENDM_AUDIT. That table does not

exist until you create an audit step for IPVENDM. Creating the step creates a database trigger on table

IPVENDM, and creates the new table IPVENDM_AUDIT.

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Setting Up For Workflows

In order for Workflows to work, the database must have an owner. Sometimes Restore and other

processes can delete the database owner. To check this, open SQL Server Management Studio and

connect to the server where your Jobscope database resides. Open the Databases listing and write click

on the Jobscope database. Click on Properties in the menu. The Database Properties screen will display.

Click on Files and the display will look like this. Be sure that the Owner field is not blank.

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The Workflow Service must be configured and started. This is described in the following section.

Enabling the Message Broker

You need to enable the SQL Server Message Broker. you can enable it using the Query window in

Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio with the following command. Set the database to master.

alter database jobscope set enable_broker

(where “jobscope” is your database name)

To do this, you need exclusive access to the database. If you don’t have exclusive access it will just sit

there indefinitely. The command should execute in less than a minute.

If you need to break the existing connections, you can use this version of the command:

alter database jobscope set enable_broker WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

If you can’t get this to work, the reason may be that the enable_broker command was issued on a

database and then that database was backed up and restored to a new database, such as you might do

to create a test database. You will need a different command on the new database. If this is the case,

you need to use this command:

alter database jobscope set new_broker WITH ROLLBACK IMMEDIATE

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Creating the Workflow Service

On the server, open Server Admin Utility, then go to Configure Services.

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When the screen opens, immediately click on the Work Flow button and a template workflow will

display in the grid. Double click the one with the Name Jobscope Workflow Service.

The intent here is to give you a template to copy for the service for each of your databases.

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When it displays, change the name to something distinctive. Most include the database in the name.

Change the location of the Auto Config file, and the server name and the database and save it.

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Check the way you want the service to interact with the desktop. If you are unsure, select Use Local

System Account. You will need to enter a valid JEE user/password. We would recommend that you

create a user called WORKFLOW so you do not “break” this if a user changes their password.

Now go to Start - Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Services. You should now have one called

“Jobscope Workflow Service”. Start that service by right clicking on it.

Note – if the service starts then stops, you will need to look in the Event Viewer to see what issue

caused this to happen.

You can set how often the service should run using the Options button on the toolbar. Set the number

of milliseconds.

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Creating the Actual Workflows

The workflows themselves are set up in System Supervisor. From the homepage, click on System

Management, System Utilities, and Workflows.

The first thing you should know is how to work with data. If you right click on File at the top left, you will

get options for New, Open, Save, and Delete. Alternately, you can do <CTRL> N, or <CTRL> O, or <CTRL

S>. To delete, you must use the File button. Be careful when deleting. If you click on File and Delete,

the whole workflow will be deleted.

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Workflow Browse

If you select Open, the Workflow browse screen displays, where you can browse for the workflow that

you want to work with.

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Creating a New Job Workflow

Let’s create a workflow for the example where we want to send a notification to a certain user via alert

and email when a new job is entered for $5000 or over. We want to send the notification to user

BPARROTT.

This is what we would enter on the header screen. The table is IPJOBM, which is the job master.

We will save it, and then we are ready for the first step, which will be a conditional step.

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The Conditional Step

We click on the dropdown beside Actions and click on New Conditional Step.

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The Workflow Step screen displays. We start by clicking on the green plus sign.

The first field dropdown allows us to select a table. The job master, IPJOBM is selected. The second

field allows us to select a column in that table, and PRICE_SALES has been selected. The next field lists

comparisons. We have selected “Is greater than or equal to”, and then the amount. The last field is for

grouping the lines. That will be discussed later.

The red minus sign is to delete and start over. We’ll click on OK and it’s done.

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Now the front screen looks like this.

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Sending an Email

With the new conditional step highlighted, we click on Child step from the drop down beside Actions.

The system will ask us to select Conditional Step (to allow for “cascading” these conditions), or Send

Email or Send Alert.

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Now we can enter the email step. We start with the name and the to/from/subject information.

We want the message to be something like “New Job 116895 for $21637.00 from customer Bayline

Manufacturing Company has been entered.”

So, in the body, we typed the first part of the message “New Job”. Now we want the job number, so we

right click at the point where we want it, and the screen looks like this.

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The dropdown looks like this.

After we select job number, it looks like this.

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We’ll do the rest of it until it looks like this, and we’ll click on OK to save it.

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After we select the fields, the front screen looks like this.

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Sending an Alert

We want to send an alert to Jane, but not just for jobs over $5000, so we won’t highlight the conditional

step, but just click on the down arrow beside Actions and click on Send Alert.

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The entry here will be exactly the same except we select a user from the drop down rather than

entering an email.

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Running a Report

We might want to run a report when a new job is entered. To do this, we’ll highlight the conditional

step and click on the down arrow by Actions. This time we’ll select Report.

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The report we want to run is the sales acknowledgment, so we’ll put that in the name.

For Module, we’ll select Job Management and Control from the dropdown, and then we’ll select the

Sales Acknowledgement.

When we select Sales Acknowledgments, the system brings in the parameters for that report. We’ll

right click in this area, and get the Insert dropdown, where we’ll select Job Number.

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So then it looks like this.

When we save it, it will uncheck the date boxes, which will take the date consideration out of the

selection.

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Finally, we need to tell the system where to deliver it, so we’ll click on the Delivery tab and make these

entries and click on OK to save it.

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Finally, when the workflow is ready to go into service, check the Active flag. The workflow will not run

unless the Active flag is checked.

When we exit, we get this message, which we’ll answer Yes.

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The report will come as an attachment to an email, and might look like this.

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Creating an Audit Workflow

This one is very simple. Everything is on the front screen. This says that anytime a record is added,

changed, or deleted from the Fixtures table, write an audit record in table Fixtures_AUDIT.

This is all there is to it.

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Creating a Workflow to Run VB.Net Code

You can add code to a work flow to actually do database updates.

To do this, highlight the step in which you want to run the code and click on the down arrow beside

Actions and click on the Run Code option.

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Let’s look at an example of a coded workflow. This example will close all the scheduling milestone steps

when the last step is closed.

This is what the complete workflow looks like.

The Recurrence section allows you to define a regular schedule for running the workflow. If the

workflow is to run based on some database activity, then the Recurrence would be None, as shown

above. If you want the workflow to run on a regular schedule, you can check one of the other

Recurrence selections. The Recurrence here works exactly like it does for the Report Scheduler, which

you can learn about in the video “Scheduling Reports in Jobscope”.

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To move along with the example, we’ll double click on the SM Milestones step.

This shows the selection. Although you can’t see it in this picture, this field is Milestone Code.

This field is Date Complete. So, the selection is saying,” If SchedulingMile.MilestoneCode = SM and

SchedulingMilestone DateComplete is not null”. This company uses a milestone code of SM for the last

milestone step.

That’s why the Recurrence is set to None. The workflow will run when the last milestone step of any set

of milestones is changed from not complete to complete.

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If we double click here, we can see the code.

This is the code.

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Grouping in the Select Statement (Default)

The last field on each line displays with the word “Default”. You can change it to anything you like.

What it does is group the lines together. The screen below shows two groupings, Default and A. We

could just as well called them A and B by changing the word Default to A. Notice the parentheses. The

value in the grouping field determines where they will be.

September 6, 2016