EnableWorkflow attribute in Sitecore's site definitions

EnableWorkflow attribute defines if the workflow support for the site is enabled or not. This is an important attribute in site definition if you want workflow to work correctly. If you miss this, you may create problems for content authors which we will discuss in the post.

The Problem

While testing a customization in Sitecore workflow, we stumbled upon following issue -

Content authors created a page in Experience Editor and left the page in Draft mode expecting all the data source items they edited on page are also in Draft state. Then a nightly automatic publish published all draft data source items to the live servers. Why did this happen?

The steps to replicate.

Create a new page in Sitecore

Open Experience Editor and add a component that needs a data source.

Select 'create a new data source' in the popup window.

Save the page in experience editor

Open the data source in the Content editor and take a look at the workflow state section. It will be blank instead of having the initial workflow state.

This only happens for non admin users. Creating a new data source directly in Content Editor (not Experience Editor) works fine and does not have this problem.

** Note that when data source is created from experience editor, if you go to Content Editor and open the item, the workflow state will be there. It is after you save the page in experience editor that the worflow state is set as null.

The Fix

Add enableWorkflow attribute to your site definition configurations as below -

<sites>

<patch:attribute name="enableWorkflow">true</patch:attribute>

</site>

</sites>

</sitecore>

</configuration>

This basically informs Sitecore that our website should support workflow. What this means is Sitecore will now make sure that when you update the workflow state of page item, Sitecore updates the workflow of the data source items correctly.

After enabling this patch, the problem got fixed for us.

Thanks for reading. Please like and share if you find this post useful.

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