How are workflow actions updated?

Prerequisites

Before reading this article, you should be familiar with:

• Typefi workflows, workflow plug-ins, and workflow actions. Typefi workflows are made up of one or more workflow actions, which perform a single task (such as exporting a PDF). Workflow actions are packaged inside workflow plug-ins. A workflow plug-in is a Java (Apache Tomcat) webapp.
• Updating an action.
• Determining the uiVersion of a plug-in through descriptor.json.

How are workflow actions updated in the Typefi Server user interface?

First, see Updating an action for how Typefi Server handles workflows with older, out-of-date uiVersions (that is, the uiVersion is less than the uiVersion of the current workflow plug-in).

Whether you manually update the action through the Typefi Server web interface or not, Typefi Server updates any affected keys and values based on a mapping table before running the job. The difference is that, without manually selecting Update, this update is only temporary and will not alter or change the original workflow.

How are workflow actions updated via the Typefi 8 API?

When running a workflow via the Typefi 8 API, there is no Update notice. Instead, Typefi Server silently updates any affected keys and values based on a mapping table before running the job so that newer plug-ins are backwards-compatible with older workflows.

However, we cannot guarantee compatibility if you partially update an older workflow (that is, you've modified key:value pairs in the workflow to the standards of a later uiVersion, but you don't actually change the uiVersion). Therefore, you must keep the uiVersion value in sync with any changes to the keys:values used in any API submissions.

See also

• Descriptor.json
• Typefi 8 Server API documentation