About Decisions

Decisions enable conditional routing in application workflows or sub-workflows. The decision is included in the Workflow Palette, and is added to a workflow by a drag-and-drop operation, the same way states and transitions are added to a workflow.

A decision has one or more incoming transitions and two or more outgoing transitions. An incoming transition connects a source state to the decision, and the outgoing transitions connect the decision to target states. When you add a decision to a workflow, two outgoing transitions are automatically added: Otherwise and Branch.

The decision evaluates rules that are associated with each outgoing transition, and the transition associated with the first rule that evaluates as "true" is executed. If a role or item type is restricted from using an outgoing transition, the workflow evaluates the rule associated with the first non-restricted outgoing transition. If no outgoing transition is allowed for a role or item type, then the transition associated with the "Otherwise" rule is executed. For information about rules, see Rule Overview.

If a decision fails to complete when the application runs, the item that entered the step will remain in the source state. This prevents changes that were saved to the item by completed actions or by the user in a transition form from being lost. (Decision failures are caused by a user abandoning or cancelling a transition form or by an error.)

When the incoming transition to a decision is the default Submit transition, the transition privileges that apply to that transition also apply to all outgoing transitions from the decision. This allows the workflow to proceed to the target state even when the submitter has limited transition privileges.

Related Topics

Conditional Routing Overview

Rule Overview

Adding a Decision

Modifying Decision Properties

Renaming a Decision

Deleting a Decision

Restrictions by Rule for a Transition