Since the beginning of time (give or take), Relativity Scripts have been a powerful tool for Relativity users and administrators to leverage. Today, I'll share how you can supercharge your workflows with Relativity Scripts.
From accessing data in a format that isn't readily available in the UI to making custom actions possible to end users, Relativity Scripts' SQL-based flexibility is a highly valuable feature. And you can bring to them into your Delegate Automated Workflows (AW) in endlessly creative ways to supercharge traditionally manual tasks.
Reporting
The most common use of Rel Scripts within Delegate is generating reports for internal teams or as the basis for client reporting. Automated Workflows allow you to pick the format just as you would within Relativity's UI, so whatever you already do there, you can do here, too.
Making your own Steps
A dozen or so (as we go to press) steps are available out of the box with AW, so only some things are available. For example, there are steps for several mass operations (e.g., Update field) that you can perform on documents in a saved search. One mass op that is not natively available (yet) is moving documents to a different folder, so if that is a core piece of your standard workflow, you might think that you'll be stuck manually doing this (or worse, not being able to use AW at all). But by using a Rel Script, we can make a step type to handle this. Â
With this script, users can select a saved search and a destination folder and move all the docs here: Delegate—Update Folder Path.txt. This is a basic example, so if you need to, you could expand it to allow users to create new folders as part of the process—or whatever you need!
Author's Aside: "Whatever you need" is a bold statement. Remember, everything has its limit... But try to be bold!
Conditionally pausing workflows
One of the most exciting uses we've seen from customers is combining AW's error-handling capabilities with purposefully throwing errors based on the results of queries in a Rel Script. For example, if you want to QC a step's work, you could write a script to look for a particular value. If the script finds something that doesn't look right, you can throw a SQL error. Then, within the step, you would pause the workflow and notify users (on Partial Complete and Error), who can check to see what's happening.
Making your own trigger
Using a similar error-throwing-and-handling approach, as shown above, you can also create your own trigger types. At a high level, this is as simple as starting your workflow with a Rel Script step and throwing an error within there if your custom conditions are not met:
Select any of the native trigger types for your workflow
Add a Run Relativity Script step that contains some query that tests for the condition you're looking for
If the condition is not met, throw an error
if the condition is met, don't do anything
Configure the step to pause (as above)
Add your other steps
Automate!
I hope you're inspired to supercharge your Automated Workflows with Relativity Scripts for even more amazing results. They're an incredibly powerful capability for users and administrators to leverage.
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