I was investigating some issues I have with workflows when I decided to create an advanced search on the processes entity. I filtered on the Category field to
only show “workflow” processes. To my surprise the result returned more records than the normal filters on workflows!!
Most of my workflows were listed several times in the list. After further investigation it turns out that the “Type” field on these workflows either contains “Activation”
or “Definition”. There only exist one record of the type “Definition” - which is the one that is shown in the standard workflow filters. But there were many of the type “Activation”. When you open these records the command bar does not include the normal buttons
for activation, deletion, etc. You can’t do anything on these records other than view the data.
My question is… Does anyone know the logic behind this?
My theory is that each time you activate a workflow a new record of the type “Activation” is created and the previous record is deactivated. The active records
contains the most recent logic. This could be used for instances where a workflow instance was started but not yet fully executed before you deactivated the workflow to change its logic. This workflow instance triggered before the logic change must execute
using the old logic which is fetched from the deactivated workflow of the type “Activation”.
Kind regards, Thomas Rath
