Use of Workflow and Workflow state

[wakespirit]

Dear all,

I am learning nfrom scratch the Service now platform as I am totaly new for it. I come to a point about workflow process for exemple in an order processing task.

At one point of the Self pack fundamental training a chapter is explaining Workflow state. I understand the global use of workflow but the at some point it is mention that a workflow as a version number. Since you do not publish the new version of the work flow that you have updated for instance , users are still using the publisg workflow version lest say V1.0

Then I have check out the workflow V1.0 in order to update it. At this point I have a first question :

Q1 : the version number of the initial workflow V1.0 is kept as it is or it is automatically incremented after update, or we need to update the version number manually ?

Based on the question Q1 answer following question raise in case new publish version of worflow is different that initialy published

Q2 : If the publish version is V1.0, then after update the version is V1.1 and I published that new version V1.1 for same workflow.. At this time which version user who was using initial version is using ? V1.0 or updated version 1.1 ?

Thanks for clarification

regards

[Kalaiarasan Pus]

I am not sure what versioning number we are talking here but ServiceNow does not add any such version number on its own as far as I know. You can change the name of the workflow to include version number to indicate its version but in any case, this number does not have any change in its functionality but it can be just a way to help in system maintenance and admins identify the versions of the workflow.

Whenever you checkout and publish the workflow, a new version of it is created in Workflow version table and at any time only one workflow version it active to be used. But whatever version of workflow was active and published at the time of request creation gets attached to it and stays with over the lifecycle of the requests. This attachment of the workflow version with a request is called workflow context.

[wakespirit]

So if I understand well the notion of version is just a table name or field of a workflow records ?

The term "Version" make me confuse

See attached picture of sample text describe in the course, especially the highlight yellow part

What is the version they are taking and why they saif workflow can run in paralell if only one can run at same time ?

thanks for clarification

[Kalaiarasan Pus · Accepted solution]

In ServiceNow, whichever is currently the active version of the workflow gets attached to it when it is created.

Version is like copies of the workflow that can get attached to a request. The versions of workflow are stored in wf_workflow_version table. As it says in the screenshot (and as did I say it earlier), there can be only one published version of the workflow but multiple inactive (old) version/copies of the workflow can exist in the version table. These old versions exist because there could be requests that are running these older versions of the workflow.

Hope this answers your question.