Update your workflows to use GenericSetup profiles

by Plone Documentation Team — last modified Dec 30, 2008 03:07 PM

To install workflows in Plone 3.0, you have to make use of CMF's GenericSetup profiles. Installing workflows in any other way is not supported, unfortunately — there are architectural changes in CMF that cannot support both approaches at the same time.

Installing workflows via GenericSetup will make your product work only on Plone 2.5 and upwards, so make sure you create a special release/branch if you want your product to still work on Plone 2.1/2.0 (which are unsupported releases when Plone 3.0 is released).

Typical error message that indicates that you are trying to install workflows not using GenericSetup::

ImportError: cannot import name addWorkflowFactory

For existing workflows, the easiest way to make the product install use GenericSetup for workflows is:

- Install your product (and its workflows) using Plone 2.5.

- Using the 'portal_setup' tool in the ZMI, export a snapshot of the current site profile:

- Click the 'Export' tab.

- Select the parts you want to export the configuration for (in this case, 'Workflow Tool').

- Click the 'Export Selected Steps' button.

- You will now get a tar file named something like 'setup_tool-20070424225827.tar'.

- Unpack the tar file, and put the resulting files and directories in a directory 'profiles/default/' in the root of your product.

- Remove the workflow directories in 'workflow/' that are not part of your product, and edit 'workflows.xml' so that it only has the information for your workflows. See "Poi changeset 41071":http://dev.plone.org/collective/changeset/41071 for an example.

- Delete your old '.py'-based workflow definitions in 'Extensions', but make sure you keep any workflow scripts, since these will be referenced from the profile definitions.

- Add a 'configure.zcml' file in the root of your product that registers the default profile. See "Poi's configure.zcml":http://dev.plone.org/collective/browser/Poi/branches/plone3-support/configure.zcml?rev=41071 for an example.

- Remove the redundant code from 'Extensions/Install.py' and add the boilerplate code to invoke the GS setup, see "Poi changeset 41071":http://dev.plone.org/collective/changeset/41071 for an example.

This process is also the same for any code you want to move to GenericSetup, in the Poi example, we also moved the catalog metadata and various other things to use GenericSetup profiles, and could get rid of most of 'Install.py' in the process.