Decision Task Replaced by Evaluation Task

Breaking Change Notice

The decision task is no longer supported in the workflow canvas for the Platform 6 release. You will need to replace it with the Evaluation task.

What should I do?

Since the decision task acts as an evaluator, use the Evaluation task to define a set of conditionals and execute a success/failure transition in the workflow. Before explaining how to use the Evaluation task in GEN 2, let's lay some groundwork by discussing how the decision task worked prior.

Figure 1 shows a decision task that takes in a color (string) and matches it to either red, green, or blue to "decide" (evaluate) which stub task to transition to in the workflow. In this scenario, the decision task acts as a set of evaluations.

Figure 1: Decision Task GEN 2 Canvas (Deprecated)

With the decision task, a set of conditional expressions also were defined for each subsequent task (Figure 2). Users could choose if “any” (at least one) or “all” of the conditions must pass in order to transition to that task. Conditionals are evaluated in order (serially), so that the first task with all conditions met is the task that is selected to run. If no conditions were met, then a “default” transition was used. In Figure 1, the “default” transition was drawn to the End of the workflow.

Figure 2: Conditionals

Using the Evaluation Task

To achieve the same branching effect, replace decision with a set of Evaluation tasks as shown in Figure 3. For each Evaluation task, you can place the same condition that was used in the decision task along with a success transition (green) to the stub task. A failure transition (purple) is used to transition to the next Evaluation task. A final failure transition from the last Evaluation task is used to create a “default” transition to the End of the workflow.

Figure 3: Evaluation Task GEN 2 Canvas (Replacement)

Figure 4 shows a snippet of input sources (operands) for the Evaluation task. Notice how the evaluation criteria is the same as the “Red” evaluation (“Does the ‘color’ job variable equal the static value ‘red’”) from the decision task in Figure 2.

Figure 4: Evaluation Task Operand Data