Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 06 – Best Practices (Bonus)

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Workflow activity labelling

One should follow the practice to label all activities in workflows, technical or campaign workflows, in a way clearly indicating what that activity is supposed to be doing in that workflow.
Example, a query activity fetching the delivery logs captured in Campaign in the previous day can be labelled as "Get delivery logs captured yesterday", enrichment activities should be labelled indicating what data is being enriched - calculated, linked, hardcoded, dropped, etc..

Indicating custom scripts in activities using "-- activity label --"

Adobe Campaign allows you to write custom code (JavaScript) in all of its workflow activities, while it also provides a dedicated JavaScript code activity. Some use cases are such that using the custom JavaScript activity in between other activities might not be the best course of action. Hence, developers write some JS code within the "Advanced" tab (initialization script) of the workflow activities.

In order to help other users reading the workflow to ascertain that an activity contains a custom JS code, one should label the workflow activity according to a particular syntax - prefixed and suffixed by double dashes ("-- ", " --") is one such convention that is most widely followed, and also a recommendation from Adobe.

Example, a test activity might be performing some calculation using JS code to determine which of the possible output transitions should be activated. In this case, the label of the activity could be labelled as "-- calculated correct transition path --". 

Workflow order in label for staggered workflows, e.g. Imports and exports

There are many technical workflows which might be running either in parallel or in a staggered fashion only a few minutes apart. Mostly the import and export workflows on an instance are configured in such a way that they either run simultaneously or just in a timed sequence, or even one after the other.

In such cases, it is ideal to number the workflows in the beginning of their label by either their order of execution or by their priority of criticality in case one of more of them run into an error.

Example, "0_ Import Recipient Data", "1_ Import Subscriptions", "2_ Import Orders Data", etc.

Signal Activity

Some workflows can be setup where the starting activity of the workflow is an "External signal" activity. It can be triggered from multiple places, from another workflow, from an API call, etc.

Very often a person studying the workflow will not know where that signal activity is triggered from. In order to avoid this problem, use the Comment field within the Advanced tab of the signal activity to document the expected origin of a signal for this activity.

Copy and Paste Workflow Activities

You can copy and paste activities within a same workflow. However, it is not recommend to copy paste activities across different workflows. Some settings attached to activities like Deliveries, File Transfer and Scheduler could lead to conflicts and errors while executing the destination workflow.

To avoid it from happening, it is recommended to Duplicate the workflows instead.

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Quick links:

    2023:

• Tuesday Tech Bytes Series 2023

    2024:

• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – INTRODUCTION
• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 01 – Tips & Tricks 
• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 02 – Best Practices 
• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 03 – Integrations
• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 04 – Golden Nuggets
• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 05 – Use case
• Tuesday Tech Bytes – Adobe Campaign Classic – Week 06 – Best Practices