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Workflow Management

Overview

The Workflow Management system allows administrators to design and operate multi-step automated processes. Workflows are visual state machines — nodes represent steps, edges represent transitions.

Workflow Designer

List & Create Workflows (admin/workflow-designer.php):

  • View all defined workflows with status (Active/Draft/Archived)
  • Click New Workflow to start the designer
  • Click an existing workflow to open its canvas

Workflow Canvas Editor (admin/workflow-designer-edit.php):

  • Drag nodes from the palette onto the canvas
  • Connect nodes by drawing edges
  • Click any node to open its side panel for configuration

Node types available:

Node Purpose
Start Entry point — triggers when a new instance is created
Task Assign a task to a user or role; waits for completion
Decision Branching logic — routes instance based on field value
Email Send a templated email
Webhook Call an external HTTP endpoint
Timer Wait for a configured period before proceeding
End Terminal node — closes the instance

Running Instances

Workflow Instances (admin/workflow-instances.php) lists all active and historical instances:

  • Filter by workflow, status, date range, or assignee
  • Click an instance to view its current node and history

Workflow Monitor

Workflow Monitor (admin/workflow-monitor.php) is the operations dashboard:

  • KPI tiles: active instances, completed today, SLA breaches, error count
  • Sortable instance table with inline actions
  • Pause — suspend an instance without losing state
  • Resume — restart a paused instance
  • Restart — reset an instance to the Start node

Dead-Letter Queue (DLQ)

Workflow DLQ (admin/workflow-dlq.php) captures instances that encountered an unrecoverable error:

  • View the error message and the node where failure occurred
  • Inspect — see full instance state and logs
  • Retry — attempt to re-execute the failed node
  • Discard — mark the instance as permanently failed

Workflow Analytics

Workflow Analytics (admin/workflow-analytics.php) provides process improvement metrics:

  • Median cycle time per workflow
  • SLA breach rate and contributing nodes
  • Bottleneck heat map — which nodes accumulate wait time
  • Path frequency — how often each route through the workflow is taken