Workflow Terminate Status

[CathyC]

Can the workflow terminate service have the ability to be renamed?
Or can we give a "Is Terminal Status" (or something) flag to normal statuses

We could probably use some discussion on what the solution should be, but there is a need for a change.

As it is, forcing it to be named "Terminate", provides no info on what happened (terminated, cancelled, complete). All workflows end at that same Terminate status. It seems to convey, from a development standpoint, that they all have no more progress to make. However, it is more useful from a business standpoint to know what their end status is.

There are applications where we have used it, but there have been requests to be able to change it.

In other applications, because of those requests, we avoid using it.

Other names we have wanted to give them:
Complete
Cancelled
Withdrawn

[Joe]

The option to give normal statuses an "Is Terminal Status" flag is my preference. That, or simply inferring that a status is terminal if it has no outgoing connections.

Either of these has the advantage of allowing use of the Arrival Event on the final status in the workflow, which is often used to trigger "Request Complete" notifications, and other logic.

[CathyC]

I have another instance where I would prefer to have a complete status that is the terminate

Here I have sales order capture workflow. I also have a method that needs to move the workflow requests to the complete status if the method notices conditions are right. The issue here is that complete means "it is done, by everyones standards, we can leave this request alone". But, terminate just means the process ended. They are kind of similar, but not the same.

I want to move the workflow requests to complete, but moving them to terminate doesnt mean the same thing.
To move them, I have to update the Status name and the StatusId. meaning I need to know the FCO-000123 value to update that also.
The easiest, but bad development, solution is to hard code it to update to Complete and a specific FCO value.
To make it dynamic, I would like to write a query before it to find out the statusid of the service called Complete, then use that.
But with the forced name Terminated, it becomes a rule that is not obvious that this specific workflow cannot ever have more than one terminate, so that query doesnt get multiple. This isnt an issue that we would run into with "Complete" because in my specific workflow, there will only be one complete.

It should be something specific to my needs for the workflow and terminate currently doesnt do that.

[CathyC]

Task 11427 was created for the discussion of this feature request