Re: [OSWF] Status of JIRA WF-198?

Ok. Before I patch, I want to know how global-actions play into the new
"workflow state" semantics of v2.6.  Here is the section that worries me:

" If the caller does not explicitly alters the instance state, the workflow
will remain in this state until it is unambigiously completed. This is
defined to be the case when the workflow cannot possibly perform any further
actions. In this case, the workflow will automatically move to the COMPLETED
state. "

So, once we reach an action with no 'local actions' available, the workflow
is marked completed. Thus, no further actions can be performed due to the
following code in doAction():

if( entry.getState() != WorkflowEntry.ACTIVATED ) {
   return;
}

So, the notion of global actions doesn't apply here.  There ARE potential
(global) actions to be fired, but the workflow state disallows it since
there are no local actions left for the current step. Fair enough.

Actually, in a true finite state machine, each state has a set of actions
(as you've correctly modelled). There is no notion of a 'global-action'.
Should we just do away with this feature entirely (in a future release)?
That would be fine by me as long as there was a feature in the XML file
allowing me to refactor a common (not global) action out that can then be
compactly referenced by id in each step it can be used.  At runtime, it
would simply appear as another ActionDescriptor for the Step.  The XML
notation below would just be shorthand (macro) for writing the action out
over and over again:

<workflow>

   <common-actions>
      <action id="99" name="Cancel Review">
         <pre-functions>
            <!-- ... -->
         </pre-functions>
         <results>
            <unconditional-result old-status   = "Interrupted"
                                  status       = "Cancelled"
                                  step         = "100"
                                  owner        = "${caller}" >
        <post-functions>
           <!-- lots of post function definitions I don't want to have to
copy/paste into each action below -->
        </post-functions>
       </unconditional-result>
         </results>
      </action>
   </common-actions>

    <step id="10" name="Initial Review"
            <action id="101" name="Complete Review">
               <!-- regular action xml goes here -->
            </action>

           <!-- Workflow Loader code will resolve this action from
common-actions above since the action body is missing -->
           <action id="99" />

          <!-- OR give it a special tag to aid in
parsability/readability -->
          <common-action id="99" />
      </step>
</workflow>


I can write the code for this.  I'd leave the current global-action
semantics intact to allow backward-compatibility and just change the Loader
so it recognized the new shorthard notation.  What do you think?

-nick


"Hani Suleiman" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Please do provide a patch, the splits/join stuff is rather murky for me
> and I'd rather someone who is actively using it provide patches than be
> guessing what it's supposed to be doing.
>
> On Wednesday, October 8, 2003, at 08:58 PM, Nicholas J. Dellamaggiore
> wrote:
>
> > I posted a JIRA about 2 months ago regarding a pretty serious
> > OSWorkflow corruption issue.  In a nutshell, if you're in a split
> > state (i.e 2 current steps are active) and you fire a global action
> > before the split is resolved, the global action creates its new step
> > and leaves the splits steps alive, thus resulting in THREE current
> > steps.  The offending code is in AbstractWorkflow (actually, I think
> > all non-getter/setter OSWF code lives here) and I detailed the
> > potentially buggy areas in the JIRA.  I noticed that the JIRA hasn't
> > been placed into the 2.6 release.  Were you planning to fix it for the
> > upcoming release? If not, I plan to just go ahead and patch it myself.
> >  Thanks.
> >
> > http://jira.opensymphony.com/secure/ViewIssue.jspa?key=WF-198
> >
> > -nick
> >
> >
> >
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