Workflows in Fusionmint are both advance and flexible, they can be configured to be triggered at specific events when you create or edit application items, or run at specific scheduled time of day/week/month. They can also used for monitoring item field values (like an approaching appointment date with your client), so without you going though the item list everyday manually, such workflows can automatically trigger an action (like sending you email reminder) or do much more. You can find details on various workflow types to explore the limitless possibilities with them.
But there can be times and quite a few important edge cases in your business wherein you may want to:
1) Re-run the workflow on items already processed, to fix something due to changes in your business rules.
2) Trigger an event based (item update) workflow for your application data, especially data that was created much before the workflow was created
All these scenarios and may be more, are manageable if you have a small set of item, which does not happen in a real business. It's not unusual to have hundreds or thousands of items, so if you add up the amount of manual work you need to do on such a large data, it can be extraordinarily large as well as tedious. And this is where the Batch Execution workflow comes in handy and saves you a lot of time.
How to Run a Workflow in Batch Execution Mode?
The option to run a workflow in Batch Execution mode is available in the "Action" column of workflow as shown below:
When you click on the menu item, you are shown a confirmation popup window to get your consent.
Just above the "Execute" button there is a CheckBox option Force reset on Items already processed by this Workflow? By default this option is un-checked. So when the option is left unchecked, only the items that have not been processed yet by the workflow, will be processed immediately. This will include items that were created a lot earlier before the workflow was created, as well as items that were created after the workflow but the workflow was PAUSED for sometime due to any reason.
When you select this checkbox option, the confirmation window expands and shows you a warning message.
This is to warn you that, now all items in the application will be processed by the workflow, including the ones already processed. This, in certain situations may be helpful as well as cause some confusion (like re-send email confirmations). As a business administrator, the final judgement call to use this option lies with you as you have better understanding of your own business needs.
Once you are OK with using/not using the option, click on "Execute" button to start the Batch Execution process. This generally takes a few minutes to get started, so be patient for some time.