Searching in-flight Workflow instances

[jayjayecl]

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 properties
I know about the workflow-console, but it cant be used by my customer, because it is not user-friendly enough. Moreover, you cannot run searches using this console.

So, here are the few questions I have :
- Are Workflow instances indexed by Lucene ?
- Are workflow instances viewable by the node browser ?
- I imagined a few scenarios for achieving my goal. What do you think of them :
a/ Modify Alfresco Search (and maybe Lucene indexing if processes are not indexed) and build a screen to display results about workflow instances
b/ Modify the Workflow Java classes so that whenever a workflow is started, a plain-txt file is automatically attached, and populated by the values of the tasks'properties. After each task, the file would be automatically updated with the pieces of info I need to search against. At the end of the process, the file is stored in a dedicated space.
c/ Build a webscript dedicated to workflow search. This will be very hard and expensive, but could be used in the future in a portal like Liferay.

Thank you

[mrogers]

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.

[jayjayecl]

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 ?

[jayjayecl]

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

Best regards

[mrogers]

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.

[jayjayecl]

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

[jayjayecl]

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 ?

[mrogers]

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.

[jayjayecl]

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

best regards,

[peglar]

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.