Provision Workflow Services

The com.waveset.provision.WorkflowServices class also contains a set of services, although they are used less often than the methods in com.waveset.session.WorkflowServices. These are the low-level primitives for performing account management, and they are primarily called by the default workflows. In a custom workflow, you might want to use these services, or you might prefer to use the higher level views with checkoutView and checkinView, which will in turn launch the stock workflows.

The primary purpose of the provision services is to give workflows access to the Provisioner, which in turn has access to resources and resource accounts. These are the services that actually perform the read/write operations on the resources themselves.

General Provision Workflow Services Call Structure

Workflows have an internal hierarchical structure that constrain both flow of control and scope of variables. A Workflow (also called a Case or WFCase) contains a list of Workflow Activity. A Workflow Activity contains a list of Actions. A variable declared at the WFCase is visible to all Activity and Action elements. If a variable named ’color’ is declared at the WFCase level, and then again in an Action, there are effectively two different variables, such that changing the value of the ’color’ variable in the Action will not affect the value of the ’color’ variable from the WFCase. Workflow services are called from workflow actions. WorkflowServices provides a set of ’operations’ that are selected through the value of the ’op’ Argument. Each operation may have a different set of arguments, so the calling ’signature’ must match the service itself. The general form of a session workflow service action is shown in the following code example:

<Action class=’com.waveset.provision.WorkflowServices’>
   <Condition/>
   <Argument name=’op’ value=workflowServiceOp/>
   <Argument name=argname1>
      <expression>value1expression</expression>
   </Argument>
   <Argument name=argname2>
      <expression>value2expression</expression>
   </Argument>
           …
   <Argument name=argnameN>
      <expression>valueNexpression</expression>
   </Argument>
</Action>

Each supported workflow services will have a variable number of required and optional arguments.

Supported Provision Workflow Services

The com.waveset.provision.WorkflowServices Javadoc contains information about currently supported provision workflow services. The op argument to the workflow services call must be one of these values.

If an unsupported op argument is given, a workflow service returns:

”Unknown WorkflowServices op’

and the workflow context variable WF_ACTION_ERROR will be non-null. Provision and session workflow services map XPRESS operations to argument names in the same way.