topic Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances in Alfresco Archive

Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:17:06 GMT

Hi,I have a strong need of building an UI for searching among workflow in-flight (or even completed) processes.This search could, for example, be run about :- Workflow native metadata , i.e statuses (On hold, cancelled etc …), priority etc …- Workflow custom propertiesI know about the workflow-conso

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

mrogers — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:36:06 GMT

The Java interfaces for searching for in-flight workflows are in the WorkflowService which has methods for queryTasks() and getActiveWorkflows() which could form the basis of your new script.

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:51:27 GMT

Thank you mrogers for these clues.
Do you confirm that there are no user-firendly UI dedicated to the administration for workflows ?

Let me be more precise. In my case, the administrator users need to be able to :
- search among workflow instances metadata (because there will be around 200 in-flight process instances simultaneously)
- check, for one instance, at which step/task the process is waiting
- check, for one instance, the previous tasks which were completed, with which values for the metadata
- check what instances are blocked
- reassign an in-flight instance
- Suspend / re-establish an instance (which could be achieved by reassigning the instance to the admin user himself… and then reassigning the instance to the previous assignee)
- stop and delete an instance

Has anyone ever done that ?
I guess building such a webscript would be really hardwork and quite long.
What do you think ?

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 16:06:47 GMT

Can you confirm that no data from Workflows instances is indexed by Lucene ?

Best regards

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

mrogers — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 12:45:46 GMT

I'm no authority on Alfresco Workflow … yet … so don't take what I say as confirming/denying anything.

However I don't think that Lucene is used to index the JBPM properties, and even if it does it would not be suitable for driving workflow anyway since workflow can require heavily transactional indexing. Lucene would however index the contents of documents involved in workflow.

There is no "friendly" alfresco workflow console other than the task lists built into Alfresco Explorer. I think the expectation was that there would be suitable third party tools developed for jBPM but they seem to have been slower to emerge than was expected. A quick google search shows that there are several options available now so you may not need to write your own console.

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:08:22 GMT

Thank you mrogers.
I'll try to find something interesting from Google.

Last but not least, maybe the lack of this administrative tool is due to the future partnership with Intalio

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:32:38 GMT

A quick google search shows that there are several options available now so you may not need to write your own console.

Sorry mrogers but I could not find anything interesting in google.
In fact, I could not even find anyone talking about building a great workflow administration UI for Alfresco.

I'd be glad to reuse the wheel instead of re-inventing it, but I don't where this wheel is …

Anyone ?

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

mrogers — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 22:16:09 GMT

I was looking at threads like these. There's something there that looks interesting (but of course I may be wrong)

http://jboss-overlord.blogspot.com/2008/08/first-glimpse-at-new-bpm-console.html
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/jboss/jboss-soa-4.2/html/JBPM_Users_Guide/ch01s04.html

Does anyone with knowlege of the latest versions of JBOSS want to chip in here.

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 09:02:32 GMT

Thank you very much, I'll have a look at it.

best regards,

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

peglar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:45:54 GMT

i am still shocked at how few people are working on a decent workflow management UI for alfresco. for our uses it would be an integral part of the product!
although i am not sure we can spend the time developing our own solution.

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:56:13 GMT

for mine, it is too …
I promise it's kinda hard and expensive to meet the requirements …

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

peglar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:04:45 GMT

looks like i will have to get freindly with the workflow avascript api and create my own webscripts! i will see you in 10 years when i have taught myself how to do it!

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

jayjayecl — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:25:40 GMT

you re about to struggle with the Workflow javascript API …
So please support my request for a better documentation

http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=17570

Re: Searching in-flight Workflow instances

peglar — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:34:35 GMT

turns out that there is a solution in the pipeline!

https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/MOB-414

and its down as critical so hopefully it will be in labs soon(ish)

Please vote for it if you would like this functionality!