Build a Simple Workflow Using K2 Studio

1. Launch K2 Studio (Start > All Programs > K2 blackpearl > K2 Studio) (Depending on your K2 blackpearl 4.7 release number, the menu items may be slightly different from the image below. The K2 Studio link should be in place regardless.)
If you do not see the K2 Studio link, contact your K2 administrator to obtain the URL for K2 Studio.



2. Start by creating a new project (File > New) using K2 Project for the K2 Type and K2 Project for the K2 Template. Name the project
   Workflow Test
   then click Create.



K2 project files can contain a variety of configurations and elements. For example, one project might contain several SmartObjects and several workflow processes. For your installation testing, you will build a K2 project with a single K2 process. Recall that the process is the container for the workflow. The process defines the resources that will integrate with the workflow. You could opt to build a process based on SharePoint or just start with a blank slate, for example. This will allow you to make the necessary configurations for K2 to communicate and interact with specific environments. For your test, you are going to build a blank, or generic, process since you only want to test K2's communication between K2, Exchange and Active Directory.

3. Next you’ll add a new process (File > New) using K2 Process for the K2 Type and Blank Process for the K2 Template. Name the new process
   Test Process
   then click Create.

After the process build is complete, your screen should look similar to the image below. (You may see the wizard bars instead of the wizard icons.) The left column contains the various K2 workflow wizards and browsers. The right side of the screen is devoted to the workflow canvas, where you will drag and drop workflow wizards and tools. At the bottom of the left column are the wizard icons (or bars), each of which containing a variety of wizards and tools you can use to build your workflow.

When space is limited, K2 condenses the wizard bars into a single row of wizard icons. Depending on your own environment, you may be viewing the bars or the icons. As you become more familiar with K2 Studio, you will associate the icons with their respective wizards. For now, if you are seeing just the icons, use the tutorial images as a guide for choosing the correct wizard.



Your first step is to add an activity to your canvas, and then a user task (event) to that activity. The user task will be assigned to the workflow originator, or more specifically, the person who started the process instance from the K2 Management site.

Where a process refers to the entire package, a process instance is a single occurrence of that process. In other words, each time a workflow is started, a new process instance is created. A single process could have many process instances.
4. Click on the Activity Wizards bar or icon to expose thewizard options.



5. Drag a DefaultActivity onto the canvas, just below the Start box.



6. Click the Event Wizards bar or icon to expose the wizard options.



7. Drag a Default Client Event into the DefaultActivity activity. (A client event is just another name for a user task. You will see the terms user task, client task and client event. They are all the same thing.)



8. The Default Client Event wizard opens. Click Next on the home screen. Name the event
   User Decision
   then click Next.



9. On the Event Notification Settings screen, CHECK the box to Notify participants when they receive a work item. Leave the remaining settings as is and click Next.
Checking the Notify participants when they receive a work item option tells K2 to send an email to the participant letting them know they have a task to action. By checking the option to customize the notification message, you would be able change the default task notification message to your own custom message. For this test however, you will use the default task notification. There are other tutorials for K2 Studio that expand on customizing the task notification email.



Now you need to configure the decision options you want to give your participant. These are called actions. Common actions include approved, not approved, rework required. cancel, etc. To keep this workflow simple, you are going to configure two actions, Football and Soccer. (At a later point in the exercise, your participant will need to choose which of the two they prefer.)

10. On the Configure Actions screen, click Add. Enter
    Football
    in the name field, then click OK.

Click Add once again and enter
Soccer
in the name field, then click OK.

Confirm that the Generate corresponding outcome(s) for listed action(s) box is CHECKED and click Next.

Here, you are telling K2 to create an outcome for each of your actions. The outcomes are basically the paths that the workflow could take depending on the action decision that is made. In the next step, you will see how K2 automatically creates lines for each of your outcomes. The lines then connect the user task outcomes to their corresponding activities and events.

Your screen should look like the image below.



11. On the Configure Outcomes screen, confirm that the Generate corresponding line(s) for listed outcome(s) box is CHECKED and click Next.



Now you want to tell K2 who to send the task to. This is sometimes referred to as the task participant and sometimes you'll see it referred to as the destination user. In your case, you want your user task assigned to the person who started the workflow (most likely you!). The person who starts a workflow is the originator and many times you will see this person referred to as the form originator, because typically, a workflow would start when a form is submitted. (To keep things simple, you are not going to use a form, but instead will fire off the workflow from the K2 Management site manually.)

You will configure your destination user by using a value found in the Context Browser. The context browser allows you to work with contextual content, or simply put, variables. At runtime, the variables are replaced with an actual value. For example, use the process originator value for your destination user. At runtime, this value will be replaced with the user name who actually started the workflow, or submitted a form for the first time.
12. On the Destination Users screen, click Add. Click the ellipses to the right of the name field to expose the Context Browser. Click the Workflow Context Browser icon, then expand the Process Instance node. Drag the Originator property into the Name field. Click Next, then Finish to complete the client event wizard.



You have one last minor detail to address before this step is complete. You need to connect the start box with user decision activity that you just added.

13. Right-click inside the Start box and hold+drag down into the DefaultActivity to connect the two workflow steps.

REVIEW

In Step 1 you created your workflow project and added a simple user or client event. You configured two outcomes, Football and Soccer, and added the process originator as the destination user. When you start a new instance of the workflow, K2 will send an email notification to the process originator. This will confirm the K2 server is able to see the process instance (Test Process) and the task manager is functioning properly by sending the task notification email through Exchange.

1. Click the Activity Wizards bar or icon and add a new DefaultActivity to the workflow canvas, just below the existing DefaultActivity. Off-set the alignment to the left of the DefaultActivity.
2. Click the Event Wizards bar or icon and add the E-mail Event to the DefaultActivity1.
In this step, you added the activity, then the event. You can simply add the event to the workflow canvas as well and K2 will automatically create the activity for you.



3. The email event wizard opens. Click Next on the home screen. Change the Event Name to
   Email Originator Football
   then UNCHECK Specify for the Recipient and CHECK Originator. For the Subject line, enter
   Test Workflow
   then click Next.
Notice that some of the fields in the wizard have red bars on the left side. These fields are required. When the Specify email recipient was checked, the To value was required. Notice that after you unchecked specify and checked originator, K2 removed the To field requirement.



4. For the message body, enter
   You chose Football.
   Click Next then Finish.



Now that you have configured the confirmation email for the football outcome line, you need to do the same for the soccer outcome line. With K2, you can simply copy and paste activities for reuse within your workflow. (On a side note, you can also copy individual events and paste them into other activities for reuse as well.)

5. Click the DefaultActivity1 icon to highlight it and keystroke CTRL-C to copy the activity. Then keystroke CTRL-V to paste a copy of the activity onto the canvas. Move the new activity so that it’s aligned to the right.



6. Click the Email Originator Football event title in the (second) DefaultActivity11 to expose the wizard icon. Click the wizard icon to open the wizard.



7. On the E-mail Event wizard home screen, click Next. Change the Event Name to
   Email Originator Soccer
   then leave the remaining values as they are and click Next.



8. Change the message body to
   You chose Soccer.
   There are no other changes in this wizard, so click Finish



The last step in your workflow is to connect the football and soccer outcome lines with their corresponding activities.

9. Hover over the green arrow for the Football outcome line until you see the hand cursor. Click+drag the football outcome line into its corresponding DefaultActivity1. Repeat this step for the Soccer outcome line. Save your workflow. (File > Save)

REVIEW

In Step 2 you added two email events (which are system tasks) to the workflow, one for the football outcome line and one for the soccer outcome line. You configured a simple email message for both events. When you test your workflow, you will confirm that K2 sends the correct email message, depending on which user task action was selected.

1. Deploy the workflow. (File > Deploy)

   The Process Build bar will appear, followed by the Deploy Project wizard. On the Deploy Project wizard home screen, click Next. On the Server and Project Settings screen, click Next, then Finish. As the workflow is deployed, you will see a deploy-in-progress bar. When the bar disappears, confirm that you can see a deployment succeeded message in the status bar (located in the lower left corner of your screen). If you see the succeeded message, your project has been successfully deployed!

REVIEW

In Step 3 you deployed the Test Process workflow to the K2 server.

1. Launch the K2 Management site (Start > All Programs > K2 blackpearl > K2 Management)
If you do not see the K2 Management site link, contact your K2 administrator to obtain the URL to the K2 Management site.



2. From the Management menu, expand the Workflow Server node, then click Workflows. A list of deployed processes, or workflow projects, will appear in the central pane. Locate the Test Process workflow, then click to highlight it. Click the Rights button in the toolbar. (Your list of workflow projects may be different from the image below.)



3. On the Workflow Rights screen, click Add. On the Add Users, Groups and Roles screen, confirm the Label is set to K2, then in the search text box, enter
   domain users
   then click the spyglass or Search button.



4. You should see domain users appear in the results section. Click to highlight Domain Users, then click Add. Click Next to continue.



5. CHECK the boxes for Start and View, then click Finish.



6. You should see the permissions for all domain users have been added to this process. (If you are not working on a K2-provided VM, you will not see the Denallix Administrator entry.) Close the workflow rights window.

REVIEW

In Step 4 you assigned process rights, or workflow permissions to all domain users to start the workflow and view the Test Process workflow reports. Because K2 Studio does not have a wizard for workflow permissions, you used the process rights tool located in the K2 Management site. (On a side note, K2 Designer-created workflows have a built-in wizard for assigning process rights.)

1. In the K2 Management site, expand the Workflow Server node (if necessary) then click Workflows to expose the deployed workflow projects in the central pane. Click to highlight the Test Process workflow, then click the Instances button in the toolbar.



2. On the Instances screen, click the Start New button in the toolbar. Change the Folio to the Use Text option and enter
   Test One
   in the text box, then click the Start button. Click OK when you see the success dialogue.



You should now see the process instance in the central pane, with the status set to active. This confirms that K2 has started the Test Process instance. Notice the Folio value reflects the manually entered text from the previous step.



What is the Folio? The folio is a text field that is commonly used to distinguish one process instance from another process instance (of the same workflow). The folio is not required, nor does it have to be unique. Since all processes, or workflows, will have the same process name, using a unique folio value will aid in identifying the individual process instances of the workflow. This is especially useful when viewing workflow reports having many process instances.

To make the folio unique, you can use a combination of fields, such as a customer name combined with an order number. Setting the folio value typically comes from properties found in the context browser. The property values are variables that are replaced at runtime by actual content specific to the process instance.

You can also use the folio as a variable throughout your workflow. For example, if you assign a customer name as the folio, you can use the folio to customize emails so that the customer is referenced by their name.

Three instances of the same workflow showing unique folio values


3. Open the workflow originator’s Outlook. Confirm that the task notification email was received.
If you are using a K2-providedVM, open a new tab in your browser, then click the OWA link found in the favorites bar. Enter the following credentials, then click sign in:
Domain\user name: Denallix\Administrator
Password: K2pass!



Notice in the message body, there is an option to action the task via e-mail. This is called SmartActions and it means that you can simply reply to the email with one of the action options in the body of the email. K2 will read the action and move the workflow along accordingly.

In your test sample, you are starting an instance of the workflow directly from the K2 Management site. In the real world, your workflow will likely start when a form has been submitted. SmartActions give your users the option of taking action on the task without having to open the form itself. Of course, if you need the user to open the form (to review form content, for example) you can simply not check the SmartActions options when you are configuring the user task.
4. Reply to the email with one of the actions in the message body.



5. You’ll likely get an email indicating your SmartAction was successful. Wait a minute or two, then confirm the email event configured in the steps above is received. Confirm that the correct email was received in that it matches the task action you replied with in the prior step.

REVIEW

In this step you started an instance of the Test Process workflow from the K2 Management site. After confirming that a task notification email was received, you actioned the task using SmartActions, which allowed you to simply respond to the email with your action decision in the message body. All of these actions confirm K2's workflow server, management site, task actions and Exchange installation configurations are correct.

This concludes the Hello World (Studio) tutorial. Explore other K2 tutorials to learn more advanced concepts for K2 SmartObjects, K2 smartforms, K2 for SharePoint, Administering K2 and Reporting in K2.