Search for specific workflow actions

Sometime you have a complex workflow with many nodes. In these situations is not always easy to troubleshoot an issue or to modify the workflow for a changing business need.

For example we may have several nodes in the workflow setting the work order status to CANC. We know that we use the WO CANC action in many places in the workflow but we want to be sure to update all the references to this action.

Unfortunately the Workflow Designer applicaton does not allow to search all the references to a specific action. There is a quick solution to this problem.

Open the Application Designer application and open the WFDESIGN app. Download the application definition. Now edit the wfdesign.xml file you have downloaded and search for ‘nodes_table_visible’.

Insert the tablecol element in bold like in the example below.

<table beanclass="psdi.webclient.beans.wfdesign.WFNodesBean" datasrc="nodes_table" id="nodes_table_visible" label="Process Nodes">
     <tablebody displayrowsperpage="10" id="nodes_table_tablebody">
         <tablecol dataattribute="title" id="nodes_table_tablebody_3"/>
         <tablecol dataattribute="description" id="nodes_table_tablebody_4"/>
         <tablecol dataattribute="nodetype" id="nodes_table_tablebody_5"/>
         <tablecol dataattribute="actions.action" id="nodes_table_tablebody_action"/>
         <tablecol dataattribute="POINTEDTO" id="nodes_table_tablebody_6"/>
         <tablecol id="nodes_table_tablebody_1" mxevent="properties" mxevent_desc="Edit Properties" mxevent_icon="workflow/properties.gif" sortable="false" type="event"/>
         <tablecol filterable="false" hidden="false" id="nodes_table_tablebody_delete" mxevent="toggledeleterow" mxevent_desc="Mark Row for Delete" mxevent_icon="btn_garbage.gif" sortable="false" type="event"/>
     </tablebody>

This will display a new column in the Process Nodes table and will allow to search for all the nodes in the workflow that are triggering a specific action.

In this screenshot i have searched for all the workflow nodes containing the WO CANC action and I see it is used in three different places of my workflow.