Re: xforms and wokflow?

I think Mark hit the nail on the head when he recognised that what I need is a way to pause a given xform 
and have it wait on various other criteria. Having said that I agree with Rob and  think it would be madness 
to expect xforms to actually do all the workflow, or whatever else might be involved here, although it could 
offer a subset of common stuff I guess. there are too many options to expect xforms to handle. As long 
as there are sufficient hooks and events that a form could generate and be trapped, that an xform might 
pause at a given point, fire events, maybe persist itself, display some "final" screen, and then "wait" until 
a set of conditions is met (maybe the fired event triggered a third party workflow manager and perhaps 
other things, that in turn triggers other forms based on data sent in the event - could be fragments of 
instance data - and until responses from all those forms are received, or various other timeout conditions 
are met etc).
Workflows can be extremely complex, involving decisions based on democratic voting, or x/y majority of 
group[ outcomes of other flows, unanimous decisions by defined parties etc, and workflows MUST be 
immutable from a users perspective in many cases. so pure client side x-forms solution is probably not 
desireable in many cases anyway due to the potential for fraud.

Anyway, this is all a bit unfortunate given my current problem.
even if I create separate forms, and code all the workflow to drive those forms, I still dont think there is a 
way I can get a form to actually finish the job for me and send all the final submissions, emails etc. I think 
I'd be stuck with writing my own x-forms parser/interpreter and trying to do the submissions myself if I 
want to keep all that in an x-form format - which I do! its incredibly simple and convenient as it is.

I hope this makes some sense, its a bit late, its friday, and I've been to the pub :) so this might read more 
"stream of conciousness" than not.

thanks
Jason.

Received on Friday, 19 August 2005 13:08:43 UTC