Editing a Workflow in Production

Do not customize a workflow process in a production environment.

Problems can emerge if you edit workflow activities or actions while instances of the original workflow are running. Specifically, the TaskInstance contains a reference to the workflow TaskDefinition and stores the current activity or action by ID. Changing these IDs may prevent the task from restarting where expected when execution resumes.

If you cannot avoid editing a workflow in a production environment, use the following procedure. It will help prevent the loss of pending work items from task instances that are using the old definition.

To Edit a Workflow in Production

1. Rename the current TaskDefinition to include a time stamp. For example, to modify the Create User workflow, rename the TaskDefinition from Create User to Create User 20080701. You can rename a workflow TaskDefinition with the Sun Java System Identity Manager IDE.

2. Save and import the edited workflow.

   Following this procedure will help prevent problems with existing Create User tasks that may be in a suspended state within Identity Manager. This allows the TaskDefinition to keep its unique ID, which is referenced inside suspended tasks.