Task Menu: Configure Rules - Editor

The Configure Rules area allows you to define the Start Rules for that task. The Start Rules for any task determines how and when that task will start while the process is executing.

Start Rules are typically based on the status of a previous task (such as another task being completed) and/or the status of previous task completing and possibly some data associated with that task such as a form question value, an approval option, etc.

In this section we will discuss:

• Configuration Editor
• Adding Rules
• Edit Rules
• Group Rules

Configure Rules Editor

To view the Start Rules for any task, hover over on the task and then Configuration and left click the Configure Rules option:

You will be presented with the Configure Rules editor and it will display the Start Rules for the task you have selected:

Note: When adding any task to the process design canvas, by default, the Start Rules will be empty.

The Configure Rules editor is broken into two distinct areas:

• Rules: The listing of all rules defined that determine how the task starts.
• Add, Edit or Delete Rules: The area that enables to you add, edit or delete a rule. This area is dynamic depending on the Rule Source Data you select.

Adding a Start Rule

You can configure the Start Rule for a task in 1 of 2 ways.

1. Drag a transition line from one task to another by left-clicking and holding the center arrow icon of the task you want the Start Rule to come from and dragging it to the task you want to start.

In the above example, we are dragging the transition line from the 1st Level Approval Approval task to the test Approval task.

Simply, release to save your layout.  Once you have done this, you can then view the Start Rule for the task by selecting the task's Configure Rules:

Note: If you want to remove the Start Rules for a given task, you can remove the transition line by selecting the transition line going to the task and selecting the delete button on your keyboard.

2. Select a task's Configure Rules option.  You will be presented with the following empty rules for the new task.  Select Add Rule as follows:

You will be presented with the following to add a rule:

To add a new Start Rule for a task, you will first start by selecting one of the available options from the Source list in the Rules Source Data section:

Above, we are adding a rule for the test Approval task to start when the Missing Information Milestone task is Completed.  The result will display:

The Source list informs Integrify whether you will be basing the new Start Rule on the Status of a task (Completed, Failed, etc), the Data (a form question value, an approval task option selection, etc), or possibly an attribute associated with the Requester of the process (Division, Department, etc).

The available Source options are as follows:

By selecting any option in the Source list, additional options will be populated in the Rule Source Data area.

For example, if the Data option is selected in the Source list, 2 new lists called Task and Field will appear in the Rule Source Data area:

The Field list is dynamic based on the Task selected. In this example, the New Hire Request Form task has been selected and the Field choice will contain all of the existing fields on the New Hire Request Form task.  Here, we selected the Full or Part-time? question and the value Full-time. 

If this were an Approval task, you would be presented with the available choices for the Approval task.

After you have defined your Rule Source Data configurations, you have multiple options with regards to how to evaluate the status or data.

You are presented with the type of Operator you would like use such as Is, Is Not, Contains, etc. These operators will be applied to the Value that you select in the corresponding box:

In our example above, we will select the Is operator as we are looking for a specific Value to be selected.

The last thing you need to do when evaluating data is select the data from the Value list you are comparing against (or depending on the data it could be a free form text field to add your own Value comparison).

For the above example Approval Task, we only want it to execute if the user selects the Approved option that has been defined for that particular Approval task.

Once you have defined the rule option, select the Add Rule button and your new rule will be added and displayed in the list area to the left:

As it stands, these two conditions together must resolve true for the task this particular task to execute.

In other words, the 1st level Approved Milestone task will be started if the 1st Level Approval Approval task is Completed AND the result of the 1st Level Approval Approval task is Approved.

Editing a Start Rule

Once a rule has been created you may edit it at any time by select the edit (pencil) icon on the row for that particular rule:

The Rule Source Data area will be pre-selected with the options originally defined for the rule. If you would like to make a change, do so and then press Update Rule:

Note: It is not recommended to change the business rule(s) if this process has a Publish Status of Production and there are outstanding Requests executing the process definition.

Grouping Rules

In some scenarios it will be necessary to group Start Rules into a series of conditions. This often occurs when a task has multiple ways for it to be started.

For example, the Rework Required Milestone task in the following process may be started by either the Manager Approval or the HR Approval task:

To accommodate for this type of scenario, it will be necessary to add the necessary status conditions and data conditions for the start rules for this task based on both the HR Approval and the Manager Approval tasks and also to group those rules so they are evaluated correctly.

You would first start off by adding the necessary conditions as performed above based on the HR Approval task being Completed and the user select the Rework option from that task:

Once the rules have been added, there needs to be some group of the rules, otherwise the system will try to evaluate all four rules as one single condition.

We start by placing our cursor in the small text box to the left of the Status label on row 1 and adding an open parentheses. The procedure is repeated on row 2 but at the end of condition:

By grouping rows 1 and 2 together, it is effectively telling the Integrify workflow engine to evaluate those two rows as one condition.

Next, you would do the same for rows 3 and 4:

Notice that there are small red indicators next to each box. This tells you that the changes have not been committed to the system yet.

In addition to group rules, it is also necessary to change the bitwise (the and/or) operator in cases such as these.

In this example we would want to change the operator starting at row 3 to indicate to Integrify that the grouping of rows 1 and 2 evaluate true OR the groups of rows 3 and 4 evaluate true for the task to start.

To change the operator just click on the “and” and you will be presented with a drop-down list:

In this case we select Or from the list and press the Save to commit the changes.

 Compare To Option

 The Compare To start rule option allows you to compare similar data from two different forms and evaluate if they are the same within a start task rule.  Here is is an example of such a rule.

Here is the rule as it was being built: