Trigger of workflow on unpublishing

Question

I want to know if is there any way we can do it. I got this article but explanation is not very clear to me. I am confused in bundle concept in below article. Can anybody explain me this.

Workflow for un-publishing component or pages

Answer 1

Bundles were introduced in Tridion 2013, they're virtual folders to which you can manually add links to items that should be handled together. This is really cool for people working on whole new sections of a site, or content revamp, and then - after they're in a bundle - you can treat all items as a single unit of work for publishing or for workflow. You can publish/unpublish a bundle (meaning it will publish or unpublish all items in it) and you can start a workflow on all the items at the same time as well.

Now... regarding your question, and the question you link to, you need to decide what approach you want to follow. You can have an event that starts workflow automatically (again, on Tridion 2013+ only) for any number of items, or you can disable publishing from the UI and force people to use workflow when unpublishing. It really depends on how your editors prefer to work.

So, decide on the flow:

• Unpublish -> Start Workflow -> Approve -> Actual Unpublish or
• Put items in bundle -> Start Workflow -> Approve -> Actual Unpublish

Once that's decided, the technical aspects are easy.

UPDATE

Since you're using Tridion 2013, the dynamics of workflow change. First off, I'd recommend NOT using component workflow and use Bundle workflow instead. This gives your editors a lot more flexibility when working with workflow and the great ability of applying the same workflow to multiple items simultaneously.

Second, I'd also recommend implementing it in a different way - rather than unpublishing from the UI, editors could add the items that they want to publish to a bundle and then start a workflow that deals with unpublishing the items (possibly unpublishing them first from staging, having a review step, then unpublishing from production). To do this I'd recommend removing the Unpublish option from the UI, something that can be achieved through an extension like this one.

If you really want to keep the experience of having people use Unpublish from the UI, then you could implement it as follows:

• Event system code that triggers when you submit something to publish
• Grab the items the editor is about to unpublish and create a new bundle and add the items to it
• Start the workflow for these items

All this can be done relatively simply once you get enough TOM.NET knowledge on this. There's some great samples of creating bundles and adding items to it automatically via Event System on this post.