2021.1

Workflow 8.7 Enhancements and Fixes
Custom Task descriptions
The Comments section of each Workflow Task can now be used as the task's description in the
Workflow Configuration tool, allowing users to better document the process without having to
resort to numerous Comment Tasks. (SHARED-39120)
Workflow processes can sometimes become rather complex and thus they require some
documentation in order to allow subsequent users to know why they were implemented in one
fashion or another. Comment tasks are already available but they use up some valuable real
estate in Workflow processes, which sometimes adds to the clutter, rather than making things
clearer.
Each task in a process also has a Comments section that allows you to properly document
what you want, but requires you to click each task in order to view the comments associated
with each (and you have to remember to display the Task Comments panel, which also robs
you of valuable on-screen real estate).
To cure these issues in Workflow 8.7 we introduced a new checkbox located below the
Comments field: Use as step description. Ticking this box instructs the Configuration tool to use
the task’s Comments as the description for the task in the Process panel, which allows you to
put in more descriptive text than the default value without having to click on each Task to
visualize it:
Option to bypass Record Persistence added to plugins
A new checkbox option has been added to both the Create PDFPreview task and the
DataMapper tab of the All-In-One task, allowing you to specify that the data should not be
stored in the database. This feature is specifically tailored for one-off jobs, to prevent data from
being written needlessly to the database. Instead, records are streamed directly into the
Content Creation process for immediate merging. Turning the feature on in the All-In-Task can
improve data mapping performance significantly, as well as the time required for the clean-up
process.
Note that checking this option in the All-In-Task means that if you ever need the data for any
reason (reprints, produce additional jobs, etc.), you will have to perform the data mapping
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