Examining Rules

Business process owners can examine the existing set of workflow rules in Archibus Web Central through the System Administration / Add-In Manager / Define Workflow Rules task.

There are four types of rules presented:

• Notification. Sends email notifications.
• DataEvent. The application notes when a record or set of records are changed
• Message .  This kind of rule is run in response from a user action (such as a button press on a form which creates an XML action message that the client workstation submits to the server).  It is the equivalent of a Navigator action or view action in the Archibus Windows product.
• Scheduled .  This kind of rule is run on a pre-determined interval (every hour, every Monday and Tuesday at 1 am, etc.).  It is run by the application itself.  Scheduled rules run repeat reminders, data transfers, benchmark calculations, and other actions that should be performed at specified intervals.

Workflow rules are sorted by application. In order to display all rules across all applcatins, click the Show All Rules button. Additional actions allow you to show rules with duplicate names and to find rules for the current project that are defined as Spring beans.

Enabling and Disabling Rules

Even if they opt not to use any other feature, facility information managers can control rule execution by using the rule's "Active?" setting. For example, you can turn on auto-approver rules, or disable notifications.

Each rule has an “Active?” setting.  To enable or disable a rule:

1. Load the Workflow Rule Manager and locate the workflow rule.
2. Click on the workflow rule and its properties display in the bottom form.
3. Set the Active? value to Yes or No.
4. Select the Save button to save the rule to the Workflow Rules table in the database.
5. Select the Reload Workflow Rules button to reload the rules from the database into active memory.  Rules are stored in the database but read into memory for fast execution when the application loads.  The reload workflow rules action reloads the rules from the database without your needing to restart the application.

Canceling Long-Running Rules

Archibus Web Central's System / Add-In Manager / Use Workflow Process Monitor lists all rules that are currently in process.  This list is typically empty, since even long-running rules are nearly instantaneous from a human standpoint.

If you do have a long running process -- such as a long data transfer -- that you wish to stop, you can do so using the Workflow Process Monitor.

• Toggle the check box in the Stop? column of the rule to stop.
• Click the Stop Selected Rules button.

Configuring Archibus Web Central for Email Notifications

In order for your notification rules to send email, you must have your mail.host.name value in the \ WEB-INF\config\mail.properties file set correctly to your email server name or IP address. See:

• General Configuration Options for Archibus Web Central

You may optionally wish to also update the mail.addresses.notificationSender value in the \WEB-INF\config\mail.properties file; this is the “from” address that appears in the header information for all automated notices.