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Workflows

Workflows let you define a multi-step automation — including branching, human approvals, timed waits, and event-triggered branches — as a versioned, visually authored graph of nodes. A workflow instance always runs against a single project and drives that project's tasks.

If you haven't read Concepts yet, it introduces where workflows fit alongside reports, event-driven automation, and scheduled jobs.

Node Types

Node Type Purpose
start Workflow entry point; declares the inputs the workflow expects (see Workflow Input Contract)
end Workflow termination
action Creates a task for an action type and waits for it to complete before advancing
human-task Pauses execution until a user completes a form through the Inbox (see Human-Task Nodes)
wait Pauses the instance for a fixed duration, then resumes automatically
receive-event Pauses the instance until a matching stream event is dispatched to it

Edges connect nodes and may carry a priority and an EL condition, so a node can branch to different next steps based on the values already in the workflow's context (e.g. an action's output, or a human-task's submitted answers).

Authoring a Workflow

Navigate to Components > Workflows and click Create Workflow. New definitions are scaffolded with a Start node (declaring projectId, ref, and an optional event input) connected directly to an End node — extend the graph from there.

The workflow editor lets you add and connect nodes, configure each node's inputs and outputs, and edit conditional edges. Changes are saved as draft content on the definition; they are not usable by running instances until you publish.

Publishing and Versions

Click Publish on the workflow detail page to validate the current draft and create a new immutable version. Publishing fails with a description of the problem if:

  • The graph is structurally invalid (e.g. disconnected nodes, missing Start/End)
  • The graph contains a node type Axiom doesn't support
  • The Start node declares an input outside the canonical input contract, or marks an input other than projectId/ref as required

Each publish creates a new version. The Versions tab lists every published version, lets you diff any two versions side by side, and shows which version is currently active (currentVersion). Existing runs continue to use the version they were started with — publishing a new version never changes the definition an in-flight run is executing.

Triggering a Workflow

A workflow can be started in two ways:

  • Manually — from a project's detail page, choose Run Workflow and select a published definition. The instance starts with only projectId and ref in its context.
  • From a subscription — a subscription routing rule with destination Create workflow finds or creates a project from the triggering event's ref, then starts the specified definition with projectId, ref, and event (the triggering event's envelope) in its context.

A project can have only one active workflow run at a time (running or waiting status). Triggering a workflow on a project that already has an active run fails.

Dispatching Events to a Waiting Workflow

Independent of create-workflow, a subscription routing rule with destination Workflow dispatch offers matching events to any workflow instance currently parked at a receive-event node — regardless of which subscription originally started that run. Matching considers the parked node's declared event type and EL condition, and event correlation is scoped to the run's project when the event carries a recognizable ref; uncorrelated events are offered to every parked receive-event node of a matching type.

Following a Run

Logs > Workflow Runs lists every workflow instance across all projects, with its status, current node, and a link to the parent project. Each run detail page shows:

  • The full node graph with the current node highlighted
  • The run's status: running, waiting, completed, failed, or cancelled
  • Any tasks created by action or human-task nodes, with links to their execution logs
  • A link to the run's execution trace, which records every node transition — see Tracing

A run parked at a human-task node surfaces its pending task in the Inbox; a run parked at a wait node resumes automatically once its resume time elapses; a run parked at a receive-event node resumes once a matching event is dispatched to it.

Cancelling a Run

From the project detail page, you can cancel a project's active workflow run. Cancelling marks the run cancelled, fails any in-progress task the run created, and removes any pending wait or event-subscription state associated with it. A cancelled run cannot be resumed.

Workflows in Configuration Packs

Workflow definitions (including their published version history) are included in Configuration Packs export/import, and can be generated by the AI Assistant's Configuration Assistant.