Chapter 5. Workflow and Approvals

As you have already seen, the Force Platform development environment can really boost your productivity by automatically implementing functionality you need in your applications. One of the strongest examples of this type of productivity benefit is provided by workflows and approvals.

Workflows allow you to implement automated actions, based on changes in your Force Platform data. You can specify a number of different actions, and limit the execution of those actions on conditions defined by the workflow.

In the real world, many business processes follow a standard set of steps. Based on the business conditions associated with an event, Force Platform workflow gives you the ability to define specific actions to be executed in response to changes in data under specific conditions, eliminating the need for additional actions by users, as well as the possibility of errors caused by incorrect or missing actions.

In order for the entire process to execute efficiently, these processes need a ‘minder’—someone or something to perform an action once a step is complete, and to trigger the next step.

Force Platform approvals are used to implement business processes involving human interaction on the Force Platform.. With Force Platform approvals, you can easily define a whole series of steps and actions to be taken at each step. Each step is triggered by the successful completion of the previous step. Each participant in the approval process can eithergrant the approval, moving the process to the next step, or reject the approval, which typically prevents the approval from continuing to the next step. You can also define actions to automatically occur once an approval process is completed, with either an overall approval or rejection.

In addition to implementing the rules and actions that make up the approval process, the Force Platform automatically monitors the process and proactively informs participants of their pending role in the process.

Workflows can significantly reduce the overall work of developing an application by simply adding standard actions to built-in data operations. Approvals can be used to create virtually complete applications, or to dramatically improve the efficiency of a business process. By the end of this chapter, you will understand the power of workflows and approvals, and probably be thinking of ways these capabilities can be used in your organization.

Important

If you have been following the examples in the previous chapter, your Force Platform organization should be ready for the exercises in this chapter. If you have not done the exercises, or want to start with a fresh version of the sample Recruiting application, please refer to the instructions in the Code Share project for this book. You can find information on how to access that project in Chapter 1: Welcome to the Force Platform. In addition, the project contains instructions on how to update your organization with changes required for this chapter. For this chapter, those changes will include modifying the appearance of the Candidate and Position page layouts. The remainder of this book will use these enhanced page layouts in subsequent illustrations.