Building
Building a workflow
The builder is a canvas. Tasks are cards; prerequisites are the lines between them. You lay the process out visually, then publish it.
1. Create the workflow
Workflows -> New workflow. Three things:
- Name — what people call the process.
- Key — a URL-safe slug, unique in your organization. Lower case, letters,
numbers and dashes:
prod-deploy. - Description — optional, one line, shown on the workflow card.
Create and open builder takes you to the canvas.
2. Add tasks
Add task in the bar at the top drops a new card on the canvas. Drag cards around freely — position is saved, and the layout is how people read the process later, so it is worth arranging deliberately: earlier work higher up, parallel work side by side.
3. Connect them
Every card has a small handle on its top and bottom edge. Drag from the bottom of one task to the top of another to say this one waits for that one.
The line you have drawn is a prerequisite. Two tasks dragged from the same predecessor both become available at once — that is how you express work that happens in parallel.
The bar at the top counts what you have: "6 tasks - 6 prerequisites".
4. Fill in each task
Click a card and the editor opens on the right:
- Title — what you are asking for.
- Instructions — how to do it, and how to tell pass from fail. Formatting is available. Optional, but this is the field that makes a workflow usable by someone who did not write it.
- Assigned to — people and groups, or leave it empty for anyone. See how assignment works. Manage groups next to it opens the group editor.
- When ready — where this task sends its work when it becomes available. Only relevant if your organization has set up connections; leave it alone otherwise.
- Fields — what the task asks you to record. See Fields.
- Delete this task — at the bottom of the panel.
5. Save
Changes are not live until you save them. A bar appears while you have unsaved work, with Save changes and Discard.
Saving is not publishing. It stores the current state of the canvas so you can come back to it.
6. Preview
Preview shows the workflow as a checklist, without generating a real one and without touching your data. Use it to check the order reads correctly and the instructions make sense before anyone runs it for real.
7. Publish
Publish raises the workflow's version — v3 becomes v4 — and makes that version what new checklists are generated from.
Two things worth knowing:
- You have to save before you can publish. The button stays disabled while there are unsaved changes.
- Publishing does not touch checklists already in flight. They stay pinned to the version they were generated from and finish it. See Checklists.
If the workflow has a problem that makes it unrunnable — a loop where two tasks wait on each other — publishing is refused until you fix it.
Then
Go to My work and generate the first checklist from it.