01b - An introduction to the Workflow Assistant – Help Center

Info: This article is work in progress and subject to change.

Introduction

The Workflow Assistant is a configurable panel inside WoodWing Assets that gives each of your users the fields, actions, and feedback they need for the job in front of them. Instead of exposing the full metadata schema to everyone, you design a focused panel for a specific task, audience, or asset kind — and surround it with guidance that keeps users on the happy path.

You design those panels in the Workflow Assistant Configurator: a separate, full-screen admin tool. Once you publish a configuration, it appears in the right-hand panel inside Assets for anyone with the required role.

This article introduces the product and the manual. The pages that follow take you from concepts to a full reference of every option the Configurator offers.

Workflow Assistant vs Workflow Assistant Configurator

Two related tools, two audiences. It helps to keep them straight before you go any further.

The Workflow Assistant is the panel your end users see in Assets. It appears on the right-hand side of the Assets interface and shows whatever you have configured for the assets they currently have selected.

The Workflow Assistant Configurator is the admin tool you use to design what appears in the panel. It is a separate, full-screen interface — also delivered as a plugin to Assets — and uses its own sign-in.

This manual is for the Configurator. End users who use a configured panel rarely need documentation of their own; the Notifications, hint text, and guard rails you build into the panel are what guides them while they work.

Note: Throughout this manual, “the panel” refers to the Workflow Assistant panel that end users see, and “the Configurator” refers to the Workflow Assistant Configurator that you use to design it.

What you can do with the Workflow Assistant

A Workflow Assistant panel can do far more than show metadata. The Configurator lets you assemble:

What you can place on a panel	What it is
Fields	Read or edit a single metadata value on the selected asset or collection. Thirteen field types are available, from plain text to date pickers, dropdowns, tags, rich text, and external data sources
Actions	Trigger something useful: navigate to a folder, run a Lucene query, stamp metadata across selected assets, or open an external URL
Notifications	Show a contextual message when a condition is met — Info, Warning, Error, or a blank message — so users always know where they are and what to do next
Widgets	Drop in turn-key components such as Pinned Collections, an Asset Link widget, a Metadata Stamp widget, a Group-into-Collection widget, or a downloadable Metadata Report
Layouts	Arrange components in single, two-, or three-column grids, with dividers to separate sections

You also control:

Which asset kinds each component applies to (image, video, audio, document, collection, no-asset, and others) so the panel adapts to whatever the user has selected
Which Assets user groups see each tab, so one panel can serve multiple audiences without exposing irrelevant configuration
When components are disabled, required, or hidden, using Lucene queries against the selected asset’s metadata
What users can type into a field, using regular-expression patterns for both live filtering and final validation
The hint text users see when they hover over a field, and the disabled message they see when they cannot interact with one

Where the Workflow Assistant fits in WoodWing Assets

The Workflow Assistant is delivered as two Assets plugins, hosted centrally by WoodWing as a SaaS service. You do not install or maintain anything on your own infrastructure.

Plugin	What it is	Where it appears	Who sees it
Workflow Assistant	The right-side panel for end users	Inside Assets, docked on the right of the user interface	Any Assets user with the Required role assigned to them
Workflow Assistant Configurator	The full-screen admin tool you use to design panels	Inside Assets, opened as an action plugin	Customer or partner administrators with a Configurator account

The Workflow Assistant supports both WoodWing Assets 6 and WoodWing Assets 10. The Configurator detects which version of Assets you are connected to and uses the matching SDK behind the scenes; you do not have to choose. Where there are differences that affect your work, this manual calls them out by name.

Who this manual is for

This manual is written for the customer or partner administrator who will design Workflow Assistant panels for their users. To get the most out of it, you should:

Be comfortable with WoodWing Assets — folders, collections, metadata fields, user groups, and roles
Know the workflow you are designing for: who does what, in what order, and where the friction points are
Be willing to read a short Lucene-query primer and a short regular-expression primer when the Configurator’s more advanced options call for them

You do not need to be a developer. The Configurator is a visual tool. JSON, Lucene, and regex appear in places where they make the tool more powerful, but every field that takes one of those values has worked examples and links into the appropriate appendix.

What you will need before you start

You will need	Notes
A Workflow Assistant Configurator account	Provisioned for you by WoodWing during onboarding. If you do not have one yet, contact your WoodWing representative
An Assets account with the Required role	The Required role is named `ROLE_CUSTOM_EVOLVED_METADATA_PLUGIN_IC`. Ask your Assets administrator to assign it to your user or, more usefully, to a user group you can place test users into
A test Assets folder	A small, low-stakes folder where you can create assets, run your panel against them, and adjust without disturbing live work
A test user	An Assets user account separate from your own, in the user group that should see the panel — so you can sign in as them and verify the panel behaves as you expect

Tip: A “test user” can be an unused colleague’s account or a dedicated demo account. Designing the panel as your admin self and then verifying it as a test user is the single highest-value habit in panel design. You will catch visibility, disabling, and required-condition mistakes that are invisible from the admin side.

How this manual is organised

The manual moves from concepts to detail, then into reference.

Section	What it covers
02 — Concepts	The mental model: panel anatomy, the three component types, asset kinds, and how Lucene and regex appear in the Configurator
03 — Getting started	Signing in to the Configurator, a tour of the interface, and a first-panel Quick Start
04 — Designing a panel	A short design methodology, plus patterns to copy and anti-patterns to avoid
05 — Configuring components	Reference pages for fields, actions and buttons, notifications, widgets, and layouts
06 — Visibility, disabling, and validation	The conditions that decide what users see, what is editable, and what is required
07 — External data sources	How to wire in values from outside Assets
08 — Tabs and audience targeting	Mapping tabs to Assets user groups so one panel serves several audiences
09 — Testing, and saving	Going from edit to live, and recovering when something goes wrong
10 — Working across Assets 6 and Assets 10	What is the same, what differs, and what to verify in each
11 — Worked examples	Real-world panels, written end-to-end
12 — Reference appendices	Lucene, regex, Moment.js date tokens, metadata field-type mapping, and a glossary

You can read the manual front-to-back the first time. After that, it is a reference. The right-hand search and the cross-links between pages are designed to land you on the page you need within a click or two.

Where to go for support

Note: If something in the Configurator does not behave as documented, contact your WoodWing or partner support representative. The Workflow Assistant team treats documentation discrepancies as bugs in the documentation, not as expected behaviour — please tell us what you found.

For roadmap questions, feature requests, or feedback on the Configurator itself, the same support channel is the right starting point.

Revisions

8 May 2026: First publication of the manual