category: User Guide title: Visual workflow diagrams + drag-drop designer
Visual workflow diagrams + drag-drop designer
Every workflow in Heratio can now be visualised as a flow chart — see at a glance how an object moves through your procedure. Beyond the diagram, you can drop into a drag-and-drop designer to model branching workflows where two paths run in parallel or where a step is conditional.
What you get
| Surface | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Workflow → Diagram (from the workflow admin list, or per-workflow edit page) | A clean read-only flow chart of every step in the workflow, with optional steps shown as diamonds and inactive steps dashed. |
| Workflow → Task → Progress diagram | The same chart, but with the current task's state coloured in — green for completed steps, amber for the current step, grey for upcoming, red if anything was rejected. |
| Workflow → Designer | A canvas where you can drag handles between step nodes to draw connections, build branches, and save the resulting graph. |
All three surfaces are reachable from the AHG Plugins → Workflow → Workflows & diagrams menu, and from contextual buttons on existing workflow pages.
Reading a diagram
- Blue rounded boxes are normal steps
- Purple diamonds are optional steps (configured per step in the workflow editor)
- Dashed grey boxes are deactivated steps
- Arrows show the order of execution
- The small numbered circle in the top-left of each step is its order
When viewing a task in progress (the "Progress diagram" link from My Tasks), the boxes are colour-coded by current state:
- Green — step completed
- Amber — current step (the one assigned to you or your team)
- Grey — pending future step
- Red — a task on that step was rejected (this is sticky — a later approval doesn't clear it from history)
When to use the designer
Most workflows are linear — step 1 → step 2 → step 3. For those, you don't need the designer at all; the diagram just renders the implicit linear order from each step's "order" number.
The designer is for the cases linear ordering can't model:
- Branching — "After Acquisition completes, EITHER ship to Cataloguing OR ship to Conservation depending on condition."
- Parallel approval gates — "Curator and Registrar must both approve before moving on."
- Conditional sign-off — "If the loan is over £10,000, route through Insurance review; otherwise skip it."
To wire any of these, open the workflow, click Designer, drag from the right edge of one step's box to the left edge of another to draw an edge, and click Save edges when done. Existing connections show up automatically, and the renderer takes over: from that moment on, the diagram displays your custom topology, not the linear fallback.
Using the designer
- Add or edit a workflow normally via Workflow → Workflows. Add all the steps you want before you start drawing edges — the designer doesn't (yet) let you create new steps from the canvas.
- Open the designer with the Designer button on the workflow's edit page.
- Drag from a node's right handle to another node's left handle to draw a connection.
- Right-click an edge to delete it.
- Save edges to persist the graph to the database. The system validates that the graph is a DAG (no loops back to an earlier step) and that every step belongs to this workflow before saving.
- Clear all edges wipes the canvas (still requires a Save to persist). Useful for starting over.
- Auto-layout resets the visual positions to a step-order grid (the data isn't lost — this is purely a visual refresh).
Designer guard rails
The save endpoint rejects with a 422 if:
- The graph contains a cycle (workflows must be DAGs)
- An edge references a step that doesn't belong to this workflow
- A self-loop is detected (step → itself)
- An edge is duplicated in the same save
When the save fails, none of the edges are written — your existing graph stays intact.
What about the existing step editor?
The step editor on the workflow edit page is still the authoritative way to add, remove, and configure steps. The designer only changes the connections between them. You can switch back and forth at will.
If a workflow has no edges saved, the diagram falls back to linear order by step_order. So adding edges later is purely additive — you can ignore the designer entirely until you actually need branching.
Where to find each surface
- AHG Plugins menu → Workflow → Workflows & diagrams — the workflow admin list with diagram + designer buttons per row
- Workflow → Workflows & diagrams → Edit a workflow — the View diagram and Designer buttons in the page header
- Workflow → My Tasks → click a task → Progress diagram — the live task progress overlay
Behind the scenes
The diagram is pure server-side SVG — no JavaScript, prints cleanly, copies to PDF cleanly. The designer is the one piece that uses JavaScript (drawflow.js v0.0.59, self-hosted; no CDN dependency).
When a task is approved, the workflow service checks the Spectrum chain rules (if any are configured) and may automatically spawn a downstream task — see the Spectrum compliance dashboard article for how chain rules work.