Imixs Workflow ...the open source workflow technology for business applications

Workflow API

Workflowkernel

The Workflowkernel is the core component of this Imixs Workflow API to control the processing of a workitem. A Workflowmanager implementation (like the Imixs JEE Worklfow) loads an instance of the Workflowkernel, hand over a Model Instance and register a list of workflow plugins.

To process a single Workitem you typical call the method 'process' of the WorkflowManager interface.

 process(ItemCollection workitem)

Registration of a Workflow Plugin

The WorkflowManager over hands the workitem to the WorkflowKernel to process the workitem by a predefined set of workflow plugins. Therefore the WorkflowKernel proviedes the method :

 registerPlugin(String)

This method enables the WorkflowManager to register different PluginClasses to be loaded by the Kernel during the Process method.

Note:
When you work with a WorkflowManager implementation like the Imixs JEE Workflow it is not necessary to registerPlugins as this will be done by the WorkflowManager.

The internal method processActivity() process an activity instance by loading and running all registered plugins. Then the method computes the next processId which will be stored in the property $ProcessID. The method processActivity will run as long as the property $ActivtyList holds additional ActivityIds to be processed. So a WorkflowManger can also run through a process queue on a single Workitem.

The Workflow Log

The WorkflowKernel generates two Log Entries.

  • txtWorkflowPluginLog - holds the registred and processed plugin classes during a process step. If a Plugin breaks with an error during processing this plugin will not be logged. So the log can be used to analize a process step in detail.
  • txtWorkflowActivityLog - holds the activity details for each process method. The entriy holds the latst ProcessEntity, the processed ActivityEntity and the new ProcessEntity.

The following examples show how the values will be stored in the workitem:

txtWorkflowPluginLog

Time - PluginClass - Result

 June 23, 2008 1:58:25 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.AccessPlugin=0
 June 23, 2008 1:58:25 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.HistoryPlugin=0
 June 23, 2008 1:58:25 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.ResultPlugin=0
 June 30, 2008 1:37:10 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.AccessPlugin=0
 June 30, 2008 1:37:10 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.HistoryPlugin=0
 June 30, 2008 1:37:10 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.ResultPlugin=0
 June 30, 2008 1:37:26 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.AccessPlugin=0
 June 30, 2008 1:37:26 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.HistoryPlugin=0
 June 30, 2008 1:37:26 PM org.imixs.workflow.plugins.ResultPlugin=0

txtWorkflowActivityLog

Time - Process.ActivityID - NewProcessID

 28.12.2008 14:07:19|11040.10:=11042, 
 24.01.2009 10:51:31|11042.20:=11043, 
 24.01.2009 10:51:36|11043.30:=11041, 
 24.01.2009 10:51:40|11041.10:=11042