WFM - variable number of instances / grouped tasks

Adam Stoller

I've been looking at trying to implement a series of processes within WFM and am curious if anyone else has run into these issues and (hopefully) found a solution for them... At this time, working with TS 6.7.1 (no SP) and whatever version of WFM came with it (1.0.0.0 client interface)

Grouped Tasks - Transitions In & Out[indent]It's kind of neat that you can group a set of tasks together as a "SubProcess", but it looks like you have to make all your transitions into and out of the set of tasks (as well as among them) before you actually group them - as you cannot create a transition into or out of the group once it is formed. On the face of it, this actually makes sense - though it would be nice if you could do this when you have the SubProcess expanded, without having to UnGroup first and re-Group afterwards...

What I find more annoying is that if I name the transitions / "Flows" going into, out of, and among the tasks which I'm grouping - the Group process seems to remove the "nice" names I applied to each of the "Flows" such that I have to re-do them. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, have you found a way to preserve that information? Or do you just not bother trying to name the transitions until you've got every single task and transition drawn?[/indent]Variable Instances[indent]The Review Task has a nice feature in which you can easily specify that the number of review tasks will be configurable based on some value set during the job instantiation process. I'd like to use that same concept for a different task or, in this case - a different group of tasks, but I don't see how to do or depict that correctly within the modeler interface.

Example: I know that I need to have a process in which 1-N sub-processes (nested workflows) need to be created in order to send content out for translation into 1-N languages. Since I cannot dynamically add tasks after the workflow has been instantiated into a job - I need to prompt for the number of instances needed during instantiation so that the end result has the proper number of tasks defined - and I will probably need task names and transitions named in a programmatic manner (e.g.: "User Task-1", "User Task-2", and "Return to User Task-1", "Return to User Task-2" -- the latter two for transitioning back from a timeout handler)

Has anyone else tried, and been able, to create a variable number of tasks (either an individual or group of tasks) in a WFM - other than the Reviewer task? If so - what did you do to set it up?

Has any else tried, and been able, to reference a task's name as part of a transition's name programmatically? If so - what did you do to set it up?[/indent]I find aspects of the WFM nice, but other aspects quite frustrating (i.e. I know I can do all of this in Perl in a WFT - but I cannot figure out how do it within a GUI interface that abstracts things to the point where I no longer have my hands directly in the code)

nipper

I posted similar queries a couple months ago. By the time I got any information back from support I had bagged WFM and wrote a WFT.

I will look to see if I can find the information support sent me.

Andy