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Build Interactive Workflows
WebLogic Integration gives you the ability to create, manage, and implement a workflow for evaluating expense reports
by Anbarasu Krishnaswamy and Vijay Mandava

June 27, 2005

Today's agile business requires significant human-machine interaction. Corporations have invested millions of dollars to automate their business processes to achieve significant ROI, but only some have succeeded in that goal. A lot of business units in large organizations still use the "evergreen" killer-application—e-mail—to conduct business operations. As good a medium as e-mail is, using it alone to track project status and lost productivity is impossible. Companies today need to measure how to decrease cost and time to complete a transaction, which can be achieved by automating their business processes.

Gone are the days when automating workflows was considered rocket science. There are plenty of software and tools to implement human workflow today, including WebLogic Integration, which provides a powerful worklist module to enable developers to implement human interactions. Let's look at how to develop end-to-end human workflow using WebLogic Integration.

Human workflow applications vary widely, but they all share some common characteristics. They implement long-running business processes, data or forms are created initially by either the system or the user, a sequence of approval processes follows, and the approver may be an individual or part of a larger group of people who gets a notification through e-mail and/or alert message. If the approver is a group, a specific individual may decide to work on the item and choose to claim it. The approver reviews the associated data, may approve or reject the form, and may add a comment or modify the associated data. The user may reassign the task to another approver. Users may need different views of forms that are waiting for their approval, are approved, and are rejected. Some users like to see an audit trail of the process.

These characteristics seem to imply that any document management system that tracks the document and has the ability to assign the documents might satisfy these needs. However, most enterprise business processes need data prefilled from various enterprise data sources, need that data updated, and need it to interact with other systems, and they must be able to perform all of these tasks in a transactional manner. The typical document management systems satisfy only self-contained, all-encompassing document management.

Develop Workflow Applications
WebLogic Integration provides BEA Process Definition for Java (JPD) processes and Worklist components to develop human workflow applications. The business processes are implemented using the JPD processes. The Worklist subsystem provides two primary controls: task control and task worker control. Task control represents a task itself, and tasks have these predetermined states:

• Assigned – a task has been assigned to a user or group but not yet claimed.
• Claimed – a user has claimed the task but has not started working.
• Started – a user has started working on it.
• Stopped – a user has stopped working.
• Completed – a task has been completed.

Tasks can be created by name or by using a task-creation XML document that provides more flexibility. Once created, the tasks can be assigned to users, groups, or both, and assigned tasks will go though their life cycle, changing their state. Tasks can also be assigned as overdue, which usually is used to perform escalation. The Worklist framework also provides callbacks to handle a task's complete, abort, or overdue events. Since these events are mutually exclusive, an event choice node is used to receive one of these events.