Workflow CSSDK

agiaccone

Am I missing something?


Ok, so I can't get web services to work with the SOAP factory. I've worked around that, after a week of beating my head against the wall, by creating my own web service wrappers around the JNI code. That's all good, because now I can reliably make calls into the Content SDK and advertise a service over the web, and I've implemented a simple file upload service. I can now submit files into TeamSite from a web-client.

Now the next step is to manage the workflow that should be started by the arrival of the file. At first I thought to start the workflow programmatically, but I couldn't figure out how to use the API to start workflow in TeamSite with out providing the workflow description. It would be nice if there was a way to start a pre-defined workflow from the ContentSevice API with out having to distribute XML to every client that wants to start that workflow. Am I missing something?

The workflow API seems more suited to building workflows then running/managing them. Or maybe I'm just ignorant about the capabilities of TeamSite. I'll give you another example. I'd like to know when a workflow is finished. Completed... I see isWorkflowActive(), I see isWorkflowValid(), I see terminate(), what I don't see is a method that tells me when a workflow is complete. I'm even able to work around that by coordinating with the workflow writer, so that when the workflow is complete a variable is set in the workflow that reflects this status. Is it unreasonable to expect that the SDK would provide that capability out of the box? Am I missing something?

I'm really trying to understand what kind of services the designers of this system expected people to build with it? Has anyone done any of the things I'm describing here?

Tony Giaccone

Migrateduser

Looks like you have to go for a more rounabout approach. I interpret the javadoc for CSWorkflowEnging exactly the way you did. So how about this - invoke the URL command for this one rather than making a SOAP call. If you use the newjob url command and pass the iw_template_file parameter it will go straight to the instantiation page of the template. If the instantiation page doesn't have any elements the user needs to fill out, it will immediately start the job.

If you did need to pass parameters, you would have to invoke the iwwft_instantiator.cgi directly, passing it the things it expects. It's a kludgy approach, but that's what keeps TeamSite developers working...