Prevent workflow launchers from starting a workflow

Workflow launchers are the standard way to trigger workflows based on changes in the content respository. The most prominent workflow which is triggered that way is the “Asset Update Workflow”, which does all the heavy lifting regarding asset processing. And it’s important to note that this workflow is executed on all changes to an asset itself, its renditions or on metadata.

But often this is not required. If you add more or custom meta data to an asset or even do it in a batch mode, you don’t want to this workflow to run at all; these metatadate changes are not relevant to assets themselves, but just to the way they should be handled in the specific context of your application.

The typical way to make the workflow not to start is to disable the workflow launcher (setting the “enabled” flag to “false”). But this is a global setting which affects all possible invocations, that means also the regular ingestion; and in that case the workflow has to run. So you need a way to specifically disable the workflow to start.

Fortunately there are a few ways how to achieve that, if you have the code under control, which performs the changes, and after which you don’t want the workflow to start again. This is key, because there is a feature available in the workflow launcher (sidenote: I just found that it has been documented; so it often makes sense to check documentation if there have been updates).

You can configure on the workflow launcher an exclusion property in the format “event-user-data:randomString”; this ignores all changes made by a JCR session which has a user-property “randomString” set.

How can you set that property? That’s quite easy:

Session session = ...;
session.getWorkspace().getObservationManager().setUserData("randomString");
// do you work with the session
session.save();

And by default the “Asset Update Workflow” is configured with “event-user-data:changedByWorkflowProcess”, so if your batch asset-operation sets the user-data to this string “changedByWorkflowProcess”, the “Asset Update Workflow” is not triggered anymore, without disabling the workflow launcher for it.

That’s it. And if you ever wanted to channel data from a saving session to the process which handles the observation events for it (the workflow launchers are just a very convenient way around the JCR Observation API): Just use event.getUserData().