a) ABC of Workflow

Oracle Workflow is unique in providing a workflow solution for both internal processes and business process coordination between applications. It automates and streamlines business processes both within and beyond our  enterprise, supporting traditional applications based workflow as well as e-business integration workflow. This technology enables modeling, automation, and continuous improvement of business processes, routing information of any type according to user-defined business rules. Oracle Workflow can route supporting information to each decision maker in a business process, including people both inside and outside our enterprise.

Oracle Workflow Builder is a graphical tool that help us  create, view, or modify a business process with simple drag and drop operations. Using the Workflow Builder,we can create and modify all workflow objects, including activities, item types, and messages etc.

Workflow Components

Depending on the Business process logic we may need to create/modify some or all of the of the following workflow process components.

Item Type

Item Type is a name/identifier of a workflow business process. Any component that we create for a workflow business process must be associated with a particular item type.

when we save our workflow process definition is database it takes the item type as its name. Opening an item type from databse automatically retrieves all the attributes, messages, lookups, notifications, functions and processes associated with that item type.

Example:- Here “Test Leave Workflow” is name of the Leave Approval business process .

Item Attribute

Item Attribute is nothing but global variable that can be accessed/ referenced by any activity within the itemtype. An item attribute often provides/stores information about an item that is necessary for the workflow process to complete. It also help us to share information with the stakeholders of a business process.

There are different types of item attribute:-

a)    Text:- The attribute value is a string of text

Note:- Oracle Workflow does not permit HTML content to be passed in attributes of type text. If Oracle Workflow encounters HTML tags in a text attribute, escape characters will be applied to display the content as plain text rather than executing the HTML.

b)    Number:- The attribute value is a number

c)    Date     :- The attribute value is a date   

d)    Lookup : -The attribute value is one of the lookup code values in a specified lookup type.

e)    Form    :- The attribute value is an Oracle Applications internal form function.

f)     URL    :-  The attribute value is a Universal Resource Locator (URL) to a network location. If we  reference a URL attribute in message attribute, the  

                     notification, when viewed from the Notification Details Web page or as an HTML-formatted e-mail, displays a link to the URL specified by the

                     URL attribute.

g)    Document:- Document attribute is mainly used to attach document in notification and help stakeholder to see the information. This attribute mainly

                         used for external document integration purpose.The following document types can be used  :-              

                                                            >>  PL/SQL document

                                                            >>  PL/SQL CLOB Document

                                                            >>  PL/SQL BLOB Document

--- Other types of attributes will be explained later. To keep our discussion simple at this stage, the other attribute types are skipped intentionally.

Message & Notification Activity

In our daily life, when we plan to send a letter to anybody, first we write a letter and then we put that inside an envelope, which contain the address of the recipient.

In oracle workflow, Message can be compared with a letter and notification can be compared with envelope. In oracle workflow a message is attached with a notification.

Recipient of the message is known as performer. Here performer needs to be added at notification level, so that workflow engine can understand to whom the notification needs to be delivered.In performer field we need to add  a value(may be dynamic by adding item attribute),so that workflow uniquely identify the  recipient from database.(Username of FND_USER table).

Each message is associated with a particular item type. This allows the message to reference the item type's attributes for token replacement at runtime when the message is delivered. We can create a message with context-sensitive content (dynamic message body) by including message attribute tokens in the message subject and body that reference item type attributes.

Note:- Unlike the real life envelope-letter analogy, here we can attach only a single message(letter) to a notification(envelope).

Function Activity

Function Activity is defined by Pl/SQL stored procedure or other external procedure.Our discussion in oracle workflow will be restricted to Pl/SQL stored procedure only.Function activity helps us to embed our custom business logic applicable to workflow business process.

Example:- We need to examine whether the person has applied for a leave for more than 10 days or less than equal to 10 days.

Conclusion:-

The Key features of Oracle Workflow are

i)The Workflow Engine embedded in the Oracle Database implements process definitions at runtime

ii) oracle uses the Business Event System which is an application service that uses the Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) infrastructure to communicate business 

    events between systems.

iii)The Workflow Definitions Loader is a utility program tightly integrated with the workflow builder and oracle application. This helps us to download workflow

   definition from database to flat file and upload it to database

iv)Oracle Workflow lets us include our own PL/SQL procedures or external functions as activities in our workflows. Without modifying our application code, you can

    have our own program run whenever the Workflow Engine detects that our program's prerequisites are satisfied.

v)The Notification System sends notifications to and processes responses from users in a workflow. Electronic notifications are routed to a role, which can be an

   individual user or a group of users. Any user associated with that role can act on the notification.

vi)Electronic mail (e-mail) users can receive notifications of outstanding work items and can respond to those notifications using their e-mail application of choice.

   An e-mail notification can include an attachment that provides another means of responding to the notification.

vii)Web users can access a Notification Web page to see their outstanding work items, then navigate to additional pages to see more details or provide a response.

References:-additional  1) https://metalink.oracle.com

                                      2) Oracle Workflow Developer's Guide ( Release 12) B31433-04

Now our goal is to create a simple custom workflow.The creation of simple workflow will be released in next tutorial.