Making Workflows Work for You
- 2. Since 2006 Anton (9) Konrad (6)
- 3. Jun 2001 Zope/Plone Workflow Relationship Feb 2001 Products.CMFCore.WorkflowCore Dec 2004 May 2006 Infrastructure for workflow development Core engine capability for Plone created Products.DCWorkflow Implementation of a CMF workflow Filled Out Functionality zope.wfmc Workflow Engine based on WfMC XPDL Attempt to standardize with development communities hurry.workflow Simple Zope 3 workflow engine Modelled after CMFWorkflow 2013 zope.wfmc is resurrected! 20132011
- 4. State-Based Workflows Examples: Products.DCWorkflow and hurry.workflow State is stored on a target Transitions between states are defined Transitions between states are defined (including permissions, etc.) State Machine ("Workflow Engine") - Manages states and transitions - Manages progression of states
- 5. Simple State-Based Publication Workflow
- 6. State-Based Workflows: One process manages single target Only one state can be maintained at a time The Reality Problems .NET and Java world have adopted this design pattern Are we to blame?
- 7. Activity-Based Workflows Examples: zope.wfmc Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation XPDL is an XML-based serialization format for BPMN Editor: Java Workflow Editor (JaWE) - Developed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) - BPMN 1.0 did not specify a serialization format. - XPDL is obsolete with BPMN 2.0 which defines an XML serialization format
- 8. Simple Activity-Based Publication Workflow
- 9. Challenges Workflow is too high-level to be machine processable Engine provides little (trivial) value Only benefit is graphical presentation and easy modification - But publication workflow is too simple for that to matter.
- 11. Workflow Engine Requirements Security Machine executable Full User Interface generation (and other IO) - But publication workflow is too simple for that to matter. Back and Forth Discarding with clean up Exception Handling Migrations - Input Data Retention
- 12. zope.wfmc enhancements Parameter InitialValue Support OTHERWISE Condition Script Tag Support Arguments are dictionaries, not lists! (Jim!!!) Deadlines Support XPDL 2.1 Support Extended Attributes Support Participant Types / Candidates Support Subflow (sync & async) & TaskScript Support DataField Support
- 13. Small activity label position (Start, Finish, Gates) Lots of small bug fixes JaWE Enhancements Script Support External Editor Support
- 14. Discarding Requires reversable applications/workitems (operations) Process must keep track of finished activities Deal with irreversible actions 鏐 Make workflow non-discardable 鏐 May not be reverted on discard
- 15. Back & Forth Requires Revert of activities in correct order Restore workflow state properly Remember inputs (not fully solved yet) It's a very hard problem! (6mm effort)
- 16. Wizard Wizard entries specified via Extended Attribute Needs to be generated from workflow definition itself No state available 鏐 Relies on default transitions and lane assignments Also, a very hard problem. (3mm effort)
- 17. Simulations Automatic Testing of Workflows 鏐 Coverage Included Strategy: Provide activity completion instructions 鏐 Implemented on API and UI level! Savepoints Debugging Screenshots Parameterized Simulations allow for complex sampledata setups (onions)
- 18. Quality Assurance Executes each simulation on multiple browsers 鏐 Provides PDFs with screenshots for each browser Visualizes workflow paths and coverage Shows all output artifacts (documents, changed data, etc.) Linter: External links, spell check, data integrity, etc.
- 19. Future Shoobx Chronicles (Support/Help) 鏐 Convert onion instructions to readable documents Simulation video recordings (Support/Help) Support Power Users to create Workflows (Process Editor UX) Personal: Bike across the US :-)
- 21. Links Shoobx zope.wfmc: https://github.com/Shoobx/zope.wfmc Java Workflow Editor: https://sourceforge.net/projects/jawe/ BPMN: http://www.bpmn.org/ WfMC/XPDL: http://www.wfmc.org/
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