Workflow

1 Simple Workflow

It's content-oriented:

  • They are unable to create multi-state workflow definitions
  • They are restricted to one or two exit transitions (approve, reject)
  • They are unable to define parallel workflows
  • They rely on folder structure for multi-stage workflow and action triggering
  • They have no notion of a task or assignment

2 Advanced Workflow

It's task-oriented:

  • Uses JBPM engine and jPDL XML based language (http://docs.jboss.com/jbpm/v3.2/userguide/html/).
  • jPDL includes a designer tool, Eclipse plugin, which is a graphical tool for authoring business processes.

As a user, you will be able to perform the following interactions using the Alfresco

Explorer interface (such as a web browser):

  • Start workflow
  • Select from a list of pre-defined workflows
  • Attach resources (additional related documents)
  • Assign users to the workflow
  • List my tasks (what have I got to do?)
  • List the tasks that I can assign to myself
  • Perform a task
  • View associated task resources (if any)
  • Change a task's state
  • Mark a task done (or other outcome)
  • Look back (display the trail of steps leading up to my task assignment)
  • Look forward (why hasn't something happened yet?)
  • Re-assign the task to someone else
  • Take ownership of a task (if it is assigned to my group)
  • Cancel or abort the workflow

There are 5 (in v3.4c) advanced workflows available out of the box.

  • Ad hoc task-based workflow: Assign tasks to your colleague on an ad hoc basis.
  • Review and Approve workflow: Assign tasks to your colleague for review and approval.
  • Revisión y aprobación en conjunto (Revisión y aprobación de contenido en conjunto).
  • Revisión y aprobación en grupo (Revisión y aprobación de contenido en grupo).
  • Revisión y aprobación paralela (Revisión y aprobación de contenido paralela).

2.1 Iniciar un flujo de trabajo avanzado

Los flujos de trabajo avanzados se inician desde un contenido mediante la acción "Iniciar flujo de trabajo avanzado".

2.2 Creating and deploying custom advanced workflows

A useful tutorial on creating and deploying your own custom workflow is provided at

http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/WorkflowAdministration

For any workflow to be deployed, you should have the following files:

  • Task model: The task model provides a description of each task in the workflow. Each task description consists of Name, Title, Properties, and Association.
  • Resource bundle (optional): A workflow resource bundle provides all of the human-readable messages that are displayed in the user interface for managing the workflow. Messages include task titles, task property names, task choices, and so on.
  • Process definition: The process definition describes the states (steps) and transitions (choices) of a workflow.
  • Web-client-config-custom.xml: Web client configuration specifies the presentation of tasks to the user in the Alfresco Explorer.

2.1.1 Building the process definition

There are two ways of building the process definition:

  1. By hand, that is, by creating a jPDL XML document.
  2. By designer, that is, by using a tool to generate the jPDL XML document.

jBPM eclipse plugin -> http://labs.jboss.com/jbossjbpm/downloads (moved?)