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
