Original Text by Lars Pind
This document describes the internal details of the workflow package. It is aimed at developers continuing the development of the package.
Other documents related to the ]project-open[ workflow include:
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Major components of the Workflow Package |
The Engine is the heart of the system. It's the part that determines what actions you can perform on a case, and keeps track of the state of the case as actions are performed. It also stores the process definitions and the state of all the cases on the system.
The Worklist is what the normal end-user sees. It's where the user goes to see the list of tasks he or she is assigned to, and interacts with the system to let us know he's done.
The Process Builder lets you define and share processes. The Process Adapter lets you customize assignments and special side-effects of your process to your situation. And finally, the Process Monitor lets you monitor the performance of a process.
wf_tasks
. This table may have more than one row per transition for a number of reasons. If the user starts the task, then decides to cancel, a new row is inserted, as the same transition becomes enabled again. If there's an iteration in the workflow definition, so the same transition becomes enabled more than once, a new row is inserted each time.
Each task has a state. It starts out as 'enabled'. It moves to 'started', then possibly to 'canceled' or 'finished' in response to user actions. If the transition is part of an implicit or-split (where two transitions share one input place), the task may become 'overridden' if the other task is triggered.
assignment_callback
column in wf_context_transition_info
.
wf_case_assignments
. You're encouraged to use the API: workflow_case.add_manual_assignment
and workflow_case.clear_manual_assignments
.
wf_context_assignments
table.wf_tasks
and the actual assignment is determined, and copied over into wf_task_assignments
. The logic is this:
wf_case_assignments
. If there is, we copy these over to wf_task_assignments
. (We used to check for a callback first, but this way if a task is reassigned, the reassignment persists for subsequent instances of the transition.)
workflow_case.add_task_assignment
API to add the actual assignment for this task.
wf_context_assignments
to wf_task_assignments
. In every event, a number of rows are created in wf_task_assignments
. This is the authoritative version of who's assigned to this task. You're free to change the assignment of a task by altering the contents of wf_task_assignments
through the API or directly. If you use the workflow UI, this change will be persistent. However, if you don't want reassignment to persist in your application, changing wf_task_assignments
alone will accomplish this.
The view wf_user_tasks
returns one row per task and per user assigned to a task. This is the view to query to get the list of tasks on a user's plate, and to get information about assignments for a task. It does the job of traversing the parties hierarchy to expand groups.
workflow_case.begin_task_action
workflow_case.set_attribute_value
zero or more times.workflow_case.end_task_action
The action
argument to the procs are 'start', 'cancel', 'finish' or 'comment'. Comment doesn't alter the state of the task, and can be used for either adding a comment on the case, and/or to set a workflow attribute without finishing the task.
It's perfectly okay to finish a task without explicitly starting it. If there are multiple users assigned to the same task, however, it's strongly recommended that the user starts the task first, as that will remove it from the worklist of other users, so we don't have multiple users working on the same task.
sql/wf-core-drop.sql
DDL script.sql/upgrade/*.sql
DDL upgrade scripts.tcl/workflow-procs.tcl
file, proc wf_export_workflow
(at the bottom).Related Workflow Topics
Related Object Types
Related Packages
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