Occasionally, you might need to create customized workflows that meet project requirements. When you do so, you should copy the workflows provided with ATG Content Administration as closely as possible, especially workflow components that handle deployment. Creating workflows from scratch for ATG Content Administration is not recommended.
Before you make any structural changes to a workflow, check whether it is in use by any open projects that might be adversely affected by your changes. Structural changes such as adding new elements or deleting existing ones, the workflow instances are deleted, and errors occur for any project using the workflow. You can safely make cosmetic changes to a workflow, such as changing its display name. You can also edit a workflow’s security access rights without causing instances of the workflow to be deleted.
For detailed information on editing workflows, refer to the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users.
Editing workflows with incomplete deployment elements
Many default workflows contain deployment elements that specify the name of the deployment target. These elements are left incomplete so you can specify your own targets as needed. However, it is impossible to save an incomplete workflow in the ACC; if you try to do so, a message appears telling you the workflow definition has errors and cannot be saved. This behavior means that you must complete the deployment elements before you can make any changes to the workflow. The workflow editor requires you to enter a valid target: to do so, you must add at least one target to your deployment topology. (See Define the Deployment Topology.)
You can avoid completing deployment elements by directly editing a copy of the workflow’s definition (.wdl) file:
Navigate to the desired workflow definition file:
<ATG2007.3dir>\Publishing\base\config\atg\registry\data\epubworkflows\Copy the file to:
<ATG2007.3dir>\home\localconfig\atg\registry\data\epubworkflows\Open and edit the copy as desired.
