Today I'll unpick the workflow model. The workflow model comes with the accelerator and One Platform models (as well as its own building block). If you find it easier to pick apart stuff in Jedox, the accelerator works a lot better than the building block.
Purpose
The workflow model has two purposes:
Where are we at with task? (i.e., for a sales budget, have we entered sales numbers for all customers?).
Lock down reports based on status of budget.
This One Platform status monitor report shows the status of the sales budget by product and customer:
You'll see a few dashboards like this in Jedox models, and the workflow cubes have a bunch of measures and rules that show what stage a budget is at.
Data Model
Workflow model consists of three cubes:
_WF Status Cube - Allows oversight on the status of workflow tasks and allows you to set editability of reports based on status. Measures include active rate, state, modified by.
_WF Task Assignments Cube - Assigns workflow tasks to users by activity/dimension. I.e., data entry could be assigned to a budget creator user group and reviewing to a reviewer group.
_WF Task Definition Cube - Contains the due dates for the task.
The workflow model looks like the below image:
Two dimensions are part of all cubes - _WF Task & _WF Activity
Workflow task is created for a version, time period and cube, and for a selected dimension which the user will budget by. Elements are generally created by an integrator job which is triggered from a spreadsheet button. The element name can be anything, but a good convention is to name it after the cube, version and month (i.e., Sales budget for 2018).
Attributes:
-Version
-Month
-Cube
-Dimension
-Workflow type
-Access Controlled
Activity contains the flow of activities from start to approve. Attributes control whether the budget report is editable at each stage.
The step dimension is part of the status and assignment cubes, which means the status and assignments can be done by dimension. I.e., if you were creating a sales budget by customer, you could assign one group of customers to a user group, and a second grouping of customers to a different user group. Then you would also be able to see the completion rate by customer, rather than only for the overall task.
Workflow PHP Macros
Jedox has workflow PHP library for workflow functions. Most of the workflow control buttons and buttons to move through stages of a workflow have a workflow macro assigned.
If you are interested the file below contains the workflow PHP library:
That's all for this post, in the next post I'll go through the workflow reports in the accelerator model, and in a third post I'll add the workflow model to an existing database.