Secondary Workflows – Kuali

Secondary workflows allow you to run additional processes—like reviews, notifications, or integrations—alongside your main submission workflow, without impacting the document’s primary workflow status. Trigger workflows manually from a document or automatically on save (based on certain criteria)—without changing the document’s main workflow status.

As an app administrator, you can create, manage, and trigger these workflows to support more flexible business processes.

When to Use Secondary Workflows

Use secondary workflows when you need to:

Trigger reviews outside of the main submission flow
Send notifications or run integrations at specific moments
Run processes before, after, or alongside the main workflow
Support parallel business processes without complicating your primary workflow

Create a Secondary Workflow

To create a Secondary Workflow:

Go to the Workflow tab in your form (which defaults to the Primary workflow view), then click the dropdown in the top left to open the Manage Workflows page.
Within Manage Workflows, you can create, manage, enable, or disable your secondary workflows. Using the three-dot menu for each workflow, you can also Publish, Rename, or Duplicate the workflow.
Click on +New Workflow (or edit and existing from the 3 dot menu) - name the workflow and select what will trigger this workflow (either manually or if the document is saved with certain criteria):
If you selected the A change to a document trigger option, the first step in your workflow will be a Trigger Step, where you can define which field changes or document criteria will trigger the workflow to run. These workflows are triggered when a user saves the document. You can switch the workflow trigger type between Manual and A change to a document at any time. Continue to build your workflow with the desired steps (more info in the Creating a Workflow article).

Note: The 'Limit this workflow to a single execution across all versions of a document' configuration option allows you to limit the trigger to the first time someone saves and that attribute trigger exists; and it won't send again on every subsequent save.
When ready you can validate the secondary workflow using the Workflow Simulator by selecting an existing document to test against or by completing a new document.
Once validated, Publish the draft secondary workflow to make it live for automatic on-save actions or available for app and product administrators to manually trigger from a document.

Note: If a workflow is updated, in-progress executions will continue using the version they started with. New runs will use the latest published version.

Manually Trigger a Secondary Workflow

For any Secondary Workflow that is a (manual) trigger you can then run that workflow in a document via the following instructions:

As an app or form administrator, open a document from the Document List.
Click the menu (⋯) in the top right of the document.
Select Run Manual Workflow; select the desired workflow and click Run:

Monitor Workflow Activity

View Workflow History

Open a document from the Document List.
Go to Workflow Status or Document History (depending on whether History is enabled in Form Settings).
Once a secondary workflow is triggered, you’ll see a dropdown in Workflow Status / Document History that lets you switch between workflows and review their individual histories.

Each step will indicate which workflow it belongs to, helping you track activity across processes.

Track Active Workflows

Use the Active Secondary Workflows column in the Document List.
Identify documents with workflows currently in progress or in an error state. Workflows in an error state will display a red status indicator icon.
You can also surface this metadata within a document if needed.

Important to Know

Secondary workflows do not change the main workflow status of a document
Multiple workflows can run at once, but the same workflow won’t run in parallel on the same document.
A document may have active workflows even if its main workflow is complete
To fully understand activity on a document, you may need to review both the main workflow status and any active secondary workflows via Workflow History.
A new Active Secondary Workflows column in the Document List helps you quickly identify which documents have workflows in progress.

Best Practices

Use secondary workflows to keep your primary workflow clean and focused
Test workflows against real documents before publishing
Clearly name workflows so admins can easily identify and trigger them
Monitor active workflows to catch errors or in-progress actions early