xforms and wokflow?

Hi,
	heres a use case I have to implement, and I'd sday its a very common scenario. I already 
have an xform that can define and build simple xforms (an xform builder form :)  ).
the forms it builds can submit the data to any number of email addresses and optionally send it to 
a data sink too (it always sends it to the sink if no email addresses are assigned)

ok - so now I have to implement a simple workflow into the system.
after one of these generated forms (just a plain old xform - we could have started the story here but 
I thought some background might help - hope it doesnt confuse) is made it gets used.
when a user fills in a form and submits the data, that data needs to be approved before it is 
stored/emailed. it may need to be approved by multiple folk, so using a workflow engine would 
make sense.

is there any way to intercept the processing of an xform so that I can accept the submission, send 
out other emails for confirmation on other forms, and then somehow ask an xform to complete its 
tasks.
I can see how I might have one form that just submits, then do some serverside logic for the 
workflow , get another form for answers, then just write code serverside to dump  the data into the 
sink, and send off the various email responses if the data is approved, but how could I achieve this 
last part by letting the xform do all that (because it already knows how to)
I may have an advantage that I am using chiba - serverside xforms implementation, so perhaps I 
could instantiate half a form serverside or something.
I run across this kind of thing all the time with xforms, I don't want to break up my simple definition 
of what data should go where - it works well all described in a simple xform, I just want to insert 
some workflow before it completes. how can i do this kind of thing without getting REALLY ugly?

any thoughts appreciated.
thanks
Jason.

Received on Friday, 19 August 2005 03:06:41 UTC