We’ve added the Items Metadata interface to most of our designs so we can have a better understanding of who in our team is editing the data, where issues are occuring and then be able to supervise/check data and offer training & support where needed.
Only, we’ve run into a problem with a number of our workflows where we use them at the end of tasks to change various statuses (eg marking as complete) and other parameters such as in the future, computations to calculate time taken to do activities.
Therefore, when we query the data everything was last edited by alloybot. Is there a way for alloybot to not be recognised and show the last non-bot edit?
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Hi!
I’m afraid this isn’t possible at the moment. I’ve raised this as an idea in our ideas portal for you here: Items Metadata - Do Not Display Alloybot Edits
We’ll look into what we can do to help here and will update the ideas ticket.
Thanks,
Jon
Thanks Jon
Just for help, I’ve noticed this happens on customer workflows but from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem to happen on Alloy workflows.
E.g. We have a customer workflow which updates a few attributes – Alloybot is the last edited user but…
If I change a task status to “Completed” Alloybot automatically fills in the “Completion Time” (as it should) but this doesn’t update the “Last edited by” – that still shows as my user.
All the best.
When someone changes the status of a task, there is a script on the API that intercepts that and as part of the same edit, will update the Completion Time of the task so it all happens in one edit operation and therefore the Last Edited By user shows as you. The logic for that isn’t actually using the workflow engine.
When you have a workflow that is listening for the edit, there are actually two edits occurring, one is the user making an edit to the item and the other is the resulting edit as part of the workflow. So in this case, the task status may be marked as complete and that edit is then written to the system, but that in turn triggers a workflow which then will edit the item again, as defined by the workflow logic. Workflows work asynchronously, so they are not completed at the same time as the triggering event. This means there are two different edits to the same item and since the workflow completes after the first, that means Alloybot will be the user who last edited the item.
Alloybot is the user that executes all workflows since workflows could do things that the triggering user isn’t allowed to do.
I hope that explains what’s happening in this case.
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