Workflows

The Workflows menu allows you to schedule various tasks and execute them at a specific date and time. This allows the execution of different Extractors and Transformers, so that they are tightly chained together.

Creating a Workflow

To create a new Workflow, go to 'Data Pipelines' > 'Workflows', then click the green button labeled 'Create Workflow'. Then create one or more New Schedule intervals:

Then add one or more steps that should be executed:

• Provide a meaningful Name for the Workflow

• Optionally you can provide a detailed Description

• Set the Type of the step using the drop-down menu

• Provide the option that goes with the selected Type. This can be your Extractor, Transformer, Report or another name

• Depending on the selected Step Type, you can provide an offset date. This value is used during the execution of that step. Typically this would be used for a From date offset (i.e. -1 for yesterday)

• A To date offset can be provided for some step types (i.e. 0 for today)

• In case multiple steps need to be executed in parallel, you may choose to remove the Wait checkbox.

• Additional arguments can be sent to the step. This applies only to some Extractors and when executing a custom Command

You can delete a step using the bin icon in the right upper corner. To execute a workflow click the Run Now button:

Bear in mind that the selected date will be influenced by date offsets defined in any given step. To view historical Workflow results, click the Status tab.

Special Workflow Steps

Apart from adding Extractor, Transformer and Report steps, there are a few other special Workflow Step types:

Publish Report

This step type will trigger a Publish Report event, which can be consumed by the notification engine.

Evaluate Budget

This step type will evaluate all budgets, which can be consumed by the notification engine.

Execute

The Execute step enables you to execute an external command, like a script:

Call external commands or scripts

As an example: you could run a Powershell script to obtain some data from a special data source that Exivity Extractors are not able or allowed to connect to. This script could be executed in the following manner:

powershell.exe "D:\script\special.ps1" ((get-date).addDays(-1)).ToString("""yyyyMMdd""")

The above command calls the Powershell executable to run the special.ps1 script, with a dynamically generated parameter that is evaluated at run time. This particular example always provides yesterday's date in yyyyMMdd format as a parameter to the special.ps1 script. Many other variations and scripting languages are possible. Feel free to experiment.