Request to Complete Move Operation Workflow in AEM

Today I will talk about an OOTB workflow provided by AEM which is “Request to Complete Move Operation” Workflow.

A little Background:

Usually, to maintain a website from the content-authoring point of view, we maintain two
groups one is content-authors and the other is content-approvers.

Content-authors: This group is used to do content authoring and don’t

have replication access. which means they can not publish the pages and make them live.

Content-approvers: The people in this group review the content and publish the pages.

Ideally, they used to have all the permission which content-authors are having with

additional permission of replicating the pages.

How to Move operation work and it’s behavior:

If the approver (or anybody having replication access) is doing the move operation-

1. If the page is not published anytime before, then the move operation will only happen in the author and the page will not be get published until the approver really publishes it.

2. If the page is already published then the move operation happens in author and publish both. Ex: If page P, in A hierarchy, is already published and the approver is moving it to B hierarchy, then the Page P  from A hierarchy will get deleted from the author as well as publish and the page P will start appearing in B hierarchy in the live site.

When the workflow (request to move operation) gets triggered??

If the move operation is done by content-authors (not having replication permission) then the

OOTB workflow “request to move operation” gets triggered. Now approver

has to approve the workflow to make it function like the above-mentioned move operation.

Client Concern:

There are so many content-authors, which are constantly moving pages from one place

to another and there is a lot of “request to move operation” inbox notification for approvers.
Clients don't want this workflow to be there, because there are hundreds of pages for which they are doing content pop and not living soon. They are still deciding hierarchy and in this process, they keep on moving pages. In such scenarios, there are always so many workflows running.

What will happen If we remove the workflow :

If the content-author moves the published pages, then this movement will happen in author

only and then how I will make this move operation available in the publish server.

Ex: If page P, in A hierarchy, is already published and the author is moving it to B hierarchy,

then the Page from A hierarchy will get deleted and will start showing in B hierarchy in author.

If they ask the approver to publish the page P from B Hierarchy, then the old page “P” is

still available in A hierarchy in the publish server and will never get deleted so we suggested

the client not remove this workflow.

How we can solve client issue:

What we suggested is, We will add one step in the workflow which will check if the page

is published/unpublished. If the page is unpublished, we will end the workflow, else the request

will go to the content-approver and the workflow will be executed like it is happening right now.

Product Bug:

We are having author/approve groups in place for our AEM servers. Ideally, content authors

don't have replication permission and because of this when the author moves a page the

"Request to Complete Move Operation" workflow is triggered. 

Now take an example if the Page "P(Considering that the page is already being published and visible on live site)" is under the "A" Hierarchy and an author trying to move it under the "B" hierarchy Then the workflow triggers.

If without completing the workflow, the approver publishes the "P" page sitting under "B" hierarchy,

then the workflow “request to move operation” workflow instance is also getting aborted and

now on the live site "P" page can be seen under A and B both hierarchies and there is no

another way to delete the "P" page from "A" hierarchy,

Note: Because the page is already being moved to the B hierarchy, so in author "A" hierarchy doesn’t have a "P" page anymore. So approver can’t unpublish the old page.
The issue is when an approver publishes the page, they don't even check if the "Request to Complete Move Operation" is running for that particular page and if they publish the pages, then there is no way to delete the old page (P under Hierarchy A) in publishing server.

I raised it as a Day Care ticket and will update here if Adobe comes up with any solution.

Workaround Solution by providing guidelines:
1. We can make a guideline for content-authors not to move the page but to ask content-approvers to do that to avoid so many notifications for move operation or to avoid the workflow enhancement.

2. We can ask content-approvers that before publishing a published page, at least check if there is any move operation workflow for that page running or not. If it is running, Complete that in place of publishing the page.
Once an approver opens the page during workflow execution, they may see a blue bar on the page with the following message:


But again guidelines can’t stop human error, So if

• If content-authors are moving the pages then Be ready by completing so many workflows or make the workflow enhancement to solve this issue.
• if content-approvers are publishing the page for which the move operation is already running, be ready to delete the pages in prod publish servers by going in CRXDE.

I know this is a long and very theoretical but I hope it is a good and interesting read for you.

Source: http://www.sgaemsolutions.com/2020/04/request-to-complete-move-operation.html