The WorkflowManager

The WorkflowManager is the central interface for each implementation of an Imixs-Workflow Engine. This interface provides the general functionality to create, process and search Workitems. The WorkflowManager instantiates the WorkflowKernel to process a WorkItem and provides the implementation of a Model. The WorkflowManager can be used by an application to process and search Workitems and provide the environment for the business logic implemented by the plugins. The WorkflowManager Service implements the WorkflowManager based on the JEE architecture.

The Plugin-API

The general workflow functions and also application specific business logic is provided by Plugin API. The WorkflowManager can register a specific set of plugins to be called by the WorkflowKernel when processing a Workitem. A typical code example is structured as follows:

....
// init WorkflowKernel 
WorkflowKernel workflowKernel =new org.imixs.workflow.WorkflowKernel(workflowContext);
// register plugins.....
workflowKernel.registerPlugin("org.imixs.workflow.plugins.AccessPlugin");
workflowKernel.registerPlugin("org.imixs.workflow.plugins.HistoryPlugin");
// processing workitem...
myWorkitem=workflowKernel.process(myWorkitem) ;
....

Processing a Workitem

The method ‘processWorkItem()’ is used to create or update a Workitem. The WorkflowManager implementation is responsible to load the Model, call the WorkflowKernel and persist the Workitem so it can be retrieved later by the application.

public void processWorkItem(ItemCollection aWorkItem)throws Exception {
   // ...instantiate workflowKernel...
   
   // ...register plugins to workflowKernel...
   
   aWorkItem=workflowKernel.process(itemCol);
   
   // ...save the workitem...
....
}

The WorkflowKernel can throw a ProcessingErrorException if the Workitem did not match the model status. Therefore the WorkflowManager implementation have to verify if the Workitem provides valid values for the properties ‘$taskID’ and ‘$eventID’.

Find Workitems

The property “$uniqueid” identifies the workitem controlled by the workflowManager. This ID can be used to load a workitem from the WorkflowManager:

workitem=wfm.getWorkItem(uniqueid);

It is also possible to receive a list of workitems for the current user by calling the method getWorkList().

List<ItemCollection> worklist=wfm.getWorkList();

The method returns a list of all workItems assigned to the current user. A workitem is typically managed by a WorkflowManger for the complete life cycle. To remove a workitem from the WorkflowManager underlying database you can call the removeWorkitem method:

wfm.removeWorkItem(workitem);

The Imixs WorkflowService

The Imixs-Workflow engine provides the WorkflowService component which implements the WorkflowManager on the JEE component stack. Find more information about the Imixs-WorkflowService in the section WorkflowService.