topic Re: New user: a question about a workflow problem in Alfresco Archive

New user: a question about a workflow problem

alessandro_ross — Fri, 15 Jul 2016 07:33:34 GMT

Hello,i'm a new (possibile) user/developer of Activiti.I have a workflow problem and i need to find a open source framework in order to solve the problem itself.can i explain here a brief summary of the problem? I need to verifity if i could use Activiti for it …Thank you very much, bye,Alessandro

Re: New user: a question about a workflow problem

trademak — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 09:11:28 GMT

Hi Alessandro, sure

Best regards,

Re: New user: a question about a workflow problem

alessandro_ross — Mon, 18 Jul 2016 12:32:51 GMT

Hi,
this is the description of my workflow problem .

There are two existing web (for the sake of simplicity) application:
the first application creates documents (for examples open office doc) and
the second application offers a list of document's operations (such as 'create a folder for a list of documents', ''transform document for open office to pdfa', 'sign a document', 'save a document', 'send a document by mail', …).

I want to realize a work flow system for the documents in which a document follow a number of step from creation to archiving.

Other details:
(i) every document is in a 'state': created, signed, sent, close, …
(ii) some 'state transitions/operations' are synchronous other are asynchronous;
(iii) some operations must be repeated (for example: sending a mail);
(iv) from one state i could come back to a previos state;
(v) within the operations there is a lot of application logic created/inferred from the first system.
(vi) the user operations are minimal;
(vii) the second system exhibits his operations by web services;

These are the fundamental features of the new workflow system.

Questions:
(i) can i adopt activiti for solving this problem? Or is activiti too powerful for this problem?
(ii) can i schedule a specific state operation in order to execute it every 'n' seconds/minutes or i need an external system (like quartz)?

My idea is to create a new web application responsible for state document transition by using
- a data structure (a database table) for save the document state
- a activiti engine (stand alone o rest api) in order to manage operations and transitions.

But i don't know if this is an effective solution, because now i'm confuse some basic concepts, for example:
if is correct to identify/save a state with/in a record in a database table or a state is identified 'implicitly' with an activiti process engine and 'retrive' from the operation request from the fist system?

Sorry for my rudimentary English!!
Sorry for the questions by i am also new in BPMN context.

Thank you in advance, best regards,
Alessandro

Re: New user: a question about a workflow problem

martin_grofcik — Tue, 19 Jul 2016 06:18:49 GMT

Hi Alessandro.

My point of view (May be Tijs has another.)

(i) can i adopt activiti for solving this problem?

Yes you can use activiti.

Or is activiti too powerful for this problem?

Activiti can be used for solving simple tasks or complicated processes too.

can i schedule a specific state operation in order to execute it every 'n' seconds/minutes or i need an external system (like quartz)?

http://activiti.org/userguide/index.html#timerEventDefinitions

Note:
Activiti is a BPM platform. In general processes change state of the object (the transition from one state to another)

Regards
Martin