Locking Fields in a Business Process Flow

 Often times, a consultant will need to implement a business process in which the user should not be allowed to go back to a previous stage to change the field values.

I had a similar requirement recently. Being a functional consultant, I try my best to implement solutions using OOB features or through point and click customization and avoid JavaScript or custom code solutions. However, I could not find any OOB functionality to implement this client request. So naturally I hit the internet and the community forums to find out how this can be implemented. What I noticed was that most of the solutions used JavaScript or custom code. So I had to go back to the drawing board and come up with my own solution.

The solution I implemented involved creating the following:

• A two options (yes/no) Custom field. I called it Lock
• A workflow to set the Lock as yes
• A workflow to check if the fields can be edited based on the Lock value.

A workflow to set the Lock as Yes:

 This workflow was implemented as an on-demand workflow and called on the stage exit of the BPF. This is the stage which once the user exists, I want to lock the fields for all previous stages.

The workflow itself is really simple. It just updates the value of Lock to Yes.

A workflow to check if the fields can be edited based on the Lock value:

This workflow was implemented as a real-time workflow. The trigger was for those fields which need to be locked and before the record is updated:

The workflow simply checks the value of Lock and throws an error if the Lock is set to Yes.

Conclusion:

As an added benefit, even if the user tries to edit the fields from the form, the workflow will not let this happen. A really simple point-and-click solution for a common scenario. I hope this article is helpful.