How to properly unpublish a workflow

kungfuu72 · ‎02-12-2016

With the Boolean values and 2 fields, Active and Published, this comes to be 4 possible combinations of values.

Between the many combinations of Active (true or false) and Published (true or false), what is the proper way to "unpublish" a workflow?

I've seen the note that active contexts for a workflow must be completed or killed before the workflow version can be unpublished (published = false).

And it appears that previous versions of the workflow are Active (active = true) and Unpublished (published = false).

Of course there are also workflows that we have that are Published (published = true) and Inactive (active = false)

This condition (in red here) is probably the one's that I want to look at to have Unpublished (published = false) and Deactivated (active = false).

How are others "decommissioning" old workflows in their environment? And what is the "proper" way to do this?

Julie Leung2 · ‎10-20-2016

Hi Daniel,

I believe the proper way to do this is to:

1. Enter Workflow Editor

2. Checkout the workflow you want to Unpublish/Inactivate

3. Select "Set Inactive" from the menu (under the Hamburger icon at top left).

4. Publish the workflow

Doing so caused the existing Workflow Version to go Unpublished/Active, and created a new Workflow Version which was Published/Inactive.

I had the "Set Inactive" option available in the Hamburger menu even before I checked out the workflow, so it's very possible I could have just Inactivated it without checking it out and re-publishing -- that's probably what created the new version that then became Published/Inactive.

Either way, my duplicate workflow that I wanted to retire no longer shows up in the search bar on the Workflow Editor.

View solution in original post

Julie Leung2 · ‎01-27-2017

Thanks for the thank you, and letting me know it helped, David!

kungfuu72 · ‎11-09-2016

Julie, for all the users out there, which instance version are you running this on?

David Christian · ‎11-09-2016

I'm on Helsinki

Julie Leung2 · ‎01-27-2017

Hi Daniel, I'm sorry I didn't see this til now. I have all my Community notifications going into a specific folder that I don't look at often.

We're running on Helsinki. At that time, we were probably on Patch 3 or Patch 4. Hope that helps.