Creating Nested Models without being required to start job

Bill Klish

TeamSite 6.7.1 Patch 3
Windows 2003 EE
Workflow Modeler 1.0.0 build 69413

We have a workflow that has a need to have a series of repeated steps for processing country data. We intended to have that occur as separate nested workflow models within the main workflow model as there doesn't seem to be a way to dynamically create n number of things during workflow model instantiation.

What ends up happening is that it gets to a url external task that creates the nested workflow models and attaches them to a nested workflow task, but then the nested workflow task is activated and it presents a Start Job item. In theory, we could just have a workflow that has an end task be part of the job spec for that nested job, but was hoping there is an easier way then having another workflow defined for no reason.

I don't think dynamically creating the job spec on the fly will work, because we would need to be passing in multiple country definitions for each of the separate workflows.

Is this just a limitation of the modeler, or is there a way around this? For now, we are just kicking off separate jobs instead of nested jobs, even though they are technically part of the main job.

Migrateduser

Bill -



I was just thinking about this issue today as I was reading the WFM documentation and trying to figure out if the new modeler would work for me. It appears you're running into the very issue I was predicting and hitting on the solution that I would have first guessed at.

I'm not a big fan of nested workflows. I used them in one instance and got them to do what I wanted, but I found it unneccesarily painful. The problem is that locks aren't managed properly (or at least they weren't in 6.5 -- maybe this is fixed). I ended up having to do an eafinishop to specify who the lockholder should be when the parent workflow was active again, add an externaltask to unlock at the end of the child workflow, and then an externaltask back in the parent workflow to check the EA and add a lock for the user specified therein. If that problem no longer exists, then I would say that nested workflows are the way to go.

I also think they are ugly from a UI perspective though, since every pass through the nested workflow creates a new job. If you have a lot of rejections, you can end up with a lot of clutter in the job list.