Understanding Workflow Action Policies

Workflow Action Policies are the rules that decide when a workflow action is available. Understanding them explains why an action is sometimes greyed out, and lets your college set rules of its own rather than living with the defaults.

How it works

• A policy is a rule about one action. Each policy names the action it governs and the conditions it applies under. Policies can govern Abandon, Force Complete, Drop, Withdraw, and the reversals of a drop or a withdrawal.
• A policy either blocks or overrides. A block policy makes the action unavailable when its conditions match, and records the reason. An override policy lifts a block for your college. The two must name the same step. An override naming a different step than the block has no effect. Step state is more forgiving: leave the override's step state set to (Any) and it lifts that block whichever state the block watches for; name a specific state and it has to match the block's exactly.
• Conditions can be precise. A policy can match on the workflow type, the category, the step involved (its type, words in its name, and the participant role it applies to), the step's state (active, executed, or not yet executed), and whether specific pieces of workflow data are present or absent. Matching on words in a step's name is what lets a policy target a single moment, such as “while an approval step with Application in its name is active.”
• Three levels of rules can apply to you. DualEnroll sets platform policies that apply to every college. If your college belongs to a college system, that system can hold policies of its own. Your college can add more on top. Your policy list shows the platform policies and your college's own, and only your college's are yours to edit. A college system's policies still apply to your workflows but are not listed there, so ask your DualEnroll representative which ones your system holds.
• A blocked action is disabled, never hidden. The menu option stays where it is, greyed out and not clickable. It doesn't say which rule disabled it. To find that, open your institution profile and choose Workflow Action Policies under Profile Options, then look for the policy whose action and step match what you were trying to do. Its reason is the explanation you would otherwise have been given. If no policy there matches, the block is coming from your college system, which your own page cannot show, and only DualEnroll can read that one back.

How it affects your workflows

When someone at your college uses one of these actions, DualEnroll checks the applicable policies before anything happens: once when it draws the menu, again when you confirm, and again when the action runs in the background. A block can't be slipped past by retrying. If one applies at the confirmation step, you get the reason as an error message instead.

Out of the box, DualEnroll blocks two things:

• Abandon, while a registration's application response is still pending, during application failure review, and while an application approval step is active.
• Force Complete, on a registration paid by credit card whose payment processing hasn't finished. Completing it at that point would leave the payment unresolved. The block applies from the moment the registration is set to pay by credit card until its payment processing completes, whether or not the card has been charged yet.

Colleges often add rules or exceptions of their own, so your list may be longer than this.

Common scenarios

• Abandon is disabled during application review. A platform policy blocks it until the application step finishes.
• Force Complete is disabled on a credit-card registration. Its payment processing hasn't finished yet. Finish it, and the action becomes available.
• Your college needs a stricter rule. You add a college policy blocking Force Complete on a particular step, so staff can't close it early.
• Your college needs an exception. You add an override naming the same step as the platform block you want lifted, leaving its step state as (Any).

Need to change this?

See Manage Workflow Action Policies to view the policies that apply to you and to create or edit your college's own.