Runs
Activation, what a run does, and how it waits for a person
Activation and runs
Activation seals the note
A Task or a Form has to be activated before it can be used. Activation does two things:
- Checks the body. A Task's workflow structure must be valid and a Form's questions must be answerable. Correct any reported issues before activating. A Task can still need people or values supplied when you choose Run.
- Seals the current version. Every run from that point is held to the body as it was sealed.
An active note is read-only. To change its instructions, choose Deactivate, edit the draft, and activate it again before starting a new run. Existing runs keep the version they started with; editing does not rewrite their instructions.
Activation is not a save. Write the body first and activate once you mean it, rather than activating something you intend to keep changing.
A Task that references a Form cannot run until that Form is activated too — the answers have to be answering a sealed set of questions.
Reports also have Activate and Deactivate controls. Activation opens a Report to receive results; it does not execute Task steps.
What a run does
Choose Run on an active Task. Supply any missing people or values in the run intake. The run then works through its compiled steps. Along the way it does the reading, the reviewing, the drafting and the extracting that the statements ask for, and records what each step produced.
The written instruction is what the work follows. Prose is not decoration around the references — it is the instruction itself.
Waiting for a person
A step can hand work to a person: an approval, a signature, an answer to a form. When a run reaches one, it stops there and waits. The person is identified, they get what they need to act, and the step stays open until they respond.
An approval handoff is not completed automatically. The assigned person must act before that step can finish. Merely mentioning a person does not create an approval request: write the handoff you want in the instruction.
Reopening the work
A run keeps its steps, its results, and the conversation around it. When the question comes back in December, you open the run and read what happened — which version of the note it followed, what each step produced, and who decided what.