Logical Components of the Workflow Module
Workflow State
A state of the evaluation process, to which only some personalities (belonging to groups defined in the DBWArm) can take decisions.
Workflow Process
A sequence of Workflow States, with a BEGIN and END built-in states, identifying the path that the document must follow to achieve the approval or the rejection.
When a document has to be approved, it isinserted into a Workflow Process, depending from the type of the document; this means that documents of different types will be routed into different Workflow Processes.
A Workflow Process is completed when the BEGIN or the END states are reached.
The Workflow Definition File SCHEMA\DBWorkFlowDef.TXT
The definitions for the Workflow Processes and the Workflow States are contained in a a text file named DBWorkFlowDef.TXT, located in the SCHEMA sub-dir of the DBWorks installation (see later for the description of the content of this file).
The file can be shared among different users as long as the SCHEMA directory is shared as well.
The ECO ID
The REVISIONS table is supposed to have a field named ECO_ID ( a varchar(30) ), where to put the Engineering Change Order Identifier for the document to be processed by the Workflow Integrated Module.
The Engineering Change Order Identifier is a string, normally identifying an issue to be solved, that will be used for grouping together documents submitted to the Workflow Processes.
Approval or Reject of an ECO ID
An ECO ID is approved or rejected when ALL the documents with the same ECO ID have their Workflow Processes approved or rejected, so, respectively, in the END (approve) or in the BEGIN (reject) states.
The OnSubmitToWorkFlow.LST script
In the LST sub-dir, the special script named OnSubmitToWorkflow.lst contains the logic for submitting a document to the Workflow Module.
In particular, the script is called with the following input parameter:
docUids = DBWInput("@DOCUMENT_UNIQUE_IDS")
containing the list of the unique ids of the documents to submit to the Workflow Module.
See later for an example of this script.
Workflow Event Log
Every action in the Workflow is recorded in a special table named DBW_WORKFLOW_EVENT_LOG.
Through queries on this table it is possible to show an history of the Workflow actions done on a document to solve an ECO.