SpiffWorkflow’s Guest Options Expands Your Business Workflows’ Reach

Are you using SpiffWorkflow to interact with people outside your organization? This article reveals how SpiffWorkflow’s Guest options feature lets you easily invite external collaborators into your automated processes, delivering a seamless and secure experience.

In a recent article, *Connect your Business Workflows to your Website with SpiffWorks, we demonstrated how data from a website can be transmitted to SpiffWorkflow to initiate a process. A key advantage of this method is that the individual submitting the information is not required to be a SpiffWorkflow user, meaning they do not need direct access to the process. An alternative approach to enable guest-users to interact with the process is also available, known as Guest options*.

As a reminder from the previous article, the website was passing a payload to a simple process which consisted of a Message Start Event, a Manual Task and an End Event, as shown below. The Message Start Event received a payload that contained the interested party’s name, email address and whether they would like a follow-up email. This payload is added to the process Task Data, as also shown below.

In order to take advantage of the capabilities of Guest options, a Script Task and Service Task will need to be added to the process, as shown below.

The Script Task will be used to build the URL the guest-user will use to access the process, as well as the email body in which it will be sent. The Service Task will use SpiffWorkflow’s SMTP connector to send the email. The Manual Task will display a message to the guest-user that their email address has been confirmed.

In order for the Guest options Task, in this case the Confirmation Manual Task, to be accessible by the guest-user, a URL needs to be created that provides the guest-user access to the process task. This URL can be easily generated using one of SpiffWorkflow’s many custom functions available to Script Tasks, specifically in this case:

get_url_for_task_with_bpmn_identifier()

The BPMN Identifier required by the custom function is the ID of the Confirmation Manual Task, which can be found by clicking on that task and looking in the General section of SpiffWorkflow Editor. In this case the ID has been assigned ‘Confirmation’, as shown below.

Clicking on the Build Guest Link Email Script Task provides access to its script editor, in which the guest URL can be built and included in the body of the email that will be sent by the Send Guest Link Email Service Task.

Note that name passed from the website into the Message Start Event payload was used in the email body, adding a touch of personalization.

Next the Send Guest URL Email Service Task will need to be configured. For this, the SpiffWorkflow smtp/SendEmail connector will be used. The smtp_host, smtp_port, smtp_user, smtp_password and smtp_starttls parameters will be set according to your SMTP provider. For testing purposes when writing this article, MailTrap was used.

The email_subject parameter was set to the string “SpiffWorks Confirmation”, but could have also been easily assigned to a variable in the preceding Script Task.

The email_body parameter was set to the variable created in the preceding Script Task by the same name.

The email address passed in as part of the Message Start Event payload was used to set the email_to parameter.

The email_from parameter was hardcoded in this case to “sales@spiff.works.com”, but also could have been passed in as a variable.

This connector is one of the many free connectors available in SpiffWorkflow.

Finally, the Guest options feature needs to be activated in the Confirmation Manual Task. Both Manual Tasks and User Tasks, collectively referred to as Human Tasks, have this feature available to them in SpiffWorkflow. Selecting the Guest can complete this task checkbox enables the feature. The guest-user will initially see what is entered in the Instructions section of the Manual Task where a combination of Markdown and Jinja can be used to create a personalized message. The Guest confirmation option allows the BPMN Process Developer to show an additional message once the Manual Task has been submitted. It also signals the end of the Human Tasks that will be available to the guest-users via the current guest URL. Multiple Human Tasks can be performed by the guest-user using a single guest URL, if desired

With all the tasks configured, the process is ready to be executed. When the test process was started, MailTrap received the following email:

Using the guest URL provided in the email, the following was presented:

And when the SUBMIT button is clicked, the guest user sees:

And to keep your marketing folks happy, these basic messages can be enhanced using Markdown and Jinja, both available in the SpiffWorkflow Editor.

SpiffWorkflow’s Guest options feature allows process developers to create seamless interactions for non-SpiffWorkflow users, extending the reach of your automated business processes without requiring direct access to SpiffWorkflow. By leveraging this feature along with SpiffWorkflow’s many other custom functions and connectors, you can enhance user experience and streamline external engagements.

Whether you are a current SpiffWorkflow user or just interested in its open source, low-code capabilities, check out SpiffWorks, our SaaS offering which quickly gets you working with SpiffWorkflow.