Configure and customize workflows id181AI0OJ0RO

Workflows enable you to automate Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) activities. A workflow consists of a series of steps that are executed in a specific order. You can define a distinct activity to execute on each step. For example, you can send an email notification to all reviewers in a group when a topic review is created. Or, send a notification to the publisher when an output generation task completes.

For more information about workflows in AEM, see:

The sections in this topic will walk you through various customizations that you can make in the default workflows shipped in the AEM Guides.

Customize review workflow id176NE0C00HS

Every organization’s content authoring team works in a specific way to meet their business requirements. In some organizations there is a dedicated editor, whereas some other organization could have automated editorial review system in place. For example, in an organization a typical authoring and publishing workflow could include tasks like - whenever an author is done with authoring content, it automatically goes to the reviewers, and when the review is complete it goes to the publisher for generating the final output. In AEM, activities that you do on your content and assets can be combined in the form of a process and mapped to an AEM workflow. For more information about workflows in AEM, see Administering Workflows in AEM documentation.

AEM Guides allows you to customize the default review workflow. You can use the following four custom review-related processes with your other authoring or publishing workflows.

When you are creating a custom review workflow, the first task is to set the required metadata needed by the Create Review process. To do so, you can create an ECMA script. A sample of the ECMA script that assigns the metadata is given below:

var workflowdata=workItem.getWorkflowData();
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("initiator","admin");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("operation","AEM_REVIEW");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("orgTopics","/content/dam/xml-solution/review.xml");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("payloadJson","{\"base\":\"/content/dam/xml-solution\",\"asset\":[\"/content/dam/xml-solution/review.xml\"],\"referrer\":\""}");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("deadline","2017-06-27T13:19:00.000+05:30");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("title","Review through custom workflow");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("description","Initiate this review process using the AEM workflow");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("assignee","user-one", "user-two");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("status","1");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("projectPath","/content/projects/review");
workflowdata.getMetaDataMap().put("startTime", System.currentTimeMillis());

You can create this script in the /etc/workflows/scripts node. The following table describes the properties being assigned by this ECMA script:

Once you have created the script, call it before calling the Create Review process in your workflow. Then, depending on your requirements, you can call the other review workflow processes.

Remove review workflow from the purge configuration

To improve the workflow engine performance, you can regularly purge completed workflow instances from the AEM repository. If you are using the default AEM configurations, then all completed workflow instances are cleaned up after a specific period of time. This also results in all review workflows to get purged from the AEM repository.

You can prevent review workflows from auto-purging by removing the review workflow model (information) from the auto-purge configuration. You need to use the Adobe Granite Workflow Purge Configuration to remove the review workflow models from auto-purging list.

In the Adobe Granite Workflow Purge Configuration, ensure that you list at least one workflow that you can safely purge. For example, you can use any of the following workflows created by AEM Guides:

Adding a workflow in the Adobe Granite Workflow Purge Configuration ensures that AEM purges only those workflows that are listed in the configuration. This prevents AEM from purging the review workflow information.

For more details about configuring the Adobe Granite Workflow Purge Configuration, see Administering Workflow Instances in AEM documentation.

Customize email templates

A number of the AEM Guides workflows make use of email notifications. For example, if you initiate a review task, an email notification is sent to the reviewers. However, to ensure that the email notification is sent, you have to enable this functionality in AEM. To enable email notification in AEM, see the article Sending Email in AEM documentation.

The AEM Guides contains a set of email templates that you can customize. Perform the following steps to customize these templates:

Customize post-output generation workflow id17A6GI004Y4

AEM Guides gives you the flexibility to specify a post-output generation workflow. You can perform some post-processing tasks on the output that gets generated using the AEM Guides. For example, you might want to apply some CQ tags on the generated AEM Site output, or set certain properties on the PDF output, or you might want to send an email to a set of users once the output is generated.

You can create a new workflow model to use as a post-output generation workflow. When a post-output generation workflow is triggered, the output generation workflow shares contextual information through the workflow metadata map, which you can use to perform processing on the generated output. The following table describes the contextual information shared as metadata:

To make use of the output generation metadata, you can create an ECMA script or an OSGi bundle. A sample of the ECMA script that uses the metadata is given below:

var session = workflowSession.getSession(); // Obtain session object to read/write the repository.
var payload = workItem.getWorkflowData().getPayload().toString(); // Get the workflow payload (the ditamap file on which the generation was triggered)
var metadata = workItem.getWorkflowData().getMetaDataMap(); // Get the workflow metadata object
var generatedPath = metadata.get("generatedPath"); // supplied by AEM Guides
var username = metadata.get("initiator"); // supplied by AEM Guides
var successful = metadata.get("isSuccess"); // supplied by AEM Guides
var title = metadata.get("outputTitle"); // supplied by AEM Guides
var subject = "Output Generation Finished";
var message = "Generation of output " + title + " just finished " +
(successful ? "successfully. " : "unsuccessfully. ");
    message += "It was triggered by " + username;
if (successful) {
    message += "<br/><br/>The path to the generated output is " +
generatedPath;
}
/*
    MailerAPI.sendMail("dl-docs-authors", subject, message);
*/

Once you have created the script, call the custom script in your workflow. Then, depending on your requirements, you can call the other workflow processes. Once you have designed your custom workflow, call the Finalize Post Generation as the last step in your workflow process. The Finalize Post Generation step ensures that the status of the output generation task gets updated to Finished on completion of the output generation process. After creating a custom post-output generation workflow, you can configure it with any of your output generation presets. Select the required workflow in the Run Post Generation Workflow property of the required preset. When you run an output generation task using the configured output preset, the task status (in the Output tab) changes to Post-Processing.