More Things you can do with Oracle Content Server workflows

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The top three things

As we've just seen, the most common things you can do are these:

1. Get content approved: This is the most obvious use of the workflow we've just seen.
2. Get people notified: Remember when we were adding workflow steps there was a number of required approvers on the Exit Conditions tab in the Add New Step dialog. If we set that to zero we accomplish one important thing: Approvers will get notified, but no action is required of them. It's a great way to "subscribe" a select group of people to an event of your choice.
3. Perform custom actions: And if that's not enough you can easily add custom scripts to any step of a workflow. You can change metadata, release items, and send them to other workflows. You can even invoke your custom Java code.

And here's another really powerful thing you can do with custom workflow actions. You can integrate with other systems and move from the local workflow to process orchestration. You can use a Content Server workflow to trigger external processes.

UCM 10gR3 has an Oracle BPEL integration built in. This means that a UCM workflow can be initiated by (or can itself initiate) a BPEL workflow that spans many systems, not just the UCM. This makes ERP systems such as Siebel, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle e-Business Suite easily accessible to the UCM, and content inside the UCM can be easily made available to these systems.

So let's look at the jumps and scripting.

Jumps and scripting

Here's how to add scripting to a workflow:

1. In Workflow Admin select a step of a workflow we've just created. Click on the Edit button on the right.
2. The Edit Step dialog comes up. Go to the Events tab (as shown in the following screenshot):

There are three events that you can add custom handlers for:

• Entry: This event triggers when an item arrives at the step.
• Update: This happens when an item or its metadata is updated. It's also initiated every hour by a timer event, Workflow Update Cycle. Use it for sending reminders to approvers or escalating the item to an alternative person after your approval period has expired.
• Exit: This event is triggered when an item has been approved and is about to exit the step. If you have defined Additional Exit Conditions on the Exit Conditions tab then those will be satisfied before this event fires.

The following diagram illustrates the sequence of states and corresponding events that are fired when a content item arrives at a workflow step:

Great! But how do we can actually add the jumps and custom scripts to a workflow step?

How to add a jump to a workflow step

Let's add an exception where content submitted by sysadmin will bypass our Manager Approval workflow. We will use a jump—a construct that causes an item to skip the normal workflow sequence and follow an alternative path. Here's how to do it:

1. Add a jump to an Entry event of our very first step. On the Events tab of the Edit Step dialog, click on the Edit button—the one next to the Entry event.
2. The Edit Script dialog displays (as shown in the following screenshot):



3. Click on the Add button. The Add Jump dialog comes up (as shown in the following screenshot):



4. Let's call the jump Sysadmin WF bypass. You don't need to change anything else at this point. Click on OK to get back to the Edit Script dialog.
5. In the Field drop-down box pick Author.
6. Click on the Select… button next to the Value box. Pick sysadmin (if you have trouble locating sysadmin in the list of users, make sure that the filter check-box is un-checked).
7. Click the Add button below the Value field. Make sure that your clause appears in the Script Clauses box below.
8. In the Target Step dropdown pick Next Step. Once you have done so the value will change to its script equivalent, @wfCurrentStep(1).
9. If you have more than one step in the workflow, change 1 to the number of steps you have. This will make sure that you jump past the last step and exit the workflow. Here's how the completed dialog will look (as shown in the following screenshot):



10. Click on OK to close. You're now back to the Events tab on the Edit Step dialog. Notice a few lines of script being added to the box next to the Entry event (as shown in the following screenshot):



11. OK the dialog. It's time to test your changes.
12. Check in a new document. Make sure you set the Author field to sysadmin. Set your Security Group to accounting, and Account to accounting/payable/current. If you don't, the item will not enter our workflow in the first place (as shown in the following screenshot):



13. Complete your check-in and follow the link to go to the Content Info page. See the status of the item. It should be set to Released. That's right. The item got right out of the workflow.

Check in a new document again, but use some other author. Notice how your item will enter the workflow and stay there. As you've seen, the dialog we used for creating a jump is simply a code generator. It created a few lines of script we needed to add the handler for the Entry event.

Click on the Edit button next to that code and pick Edit Current to study it. You can find all the script function definitions in iDoc Reference Guide.

Perfect! And we're still not done.

What if you have a few common steps that you'd like to reuse in a bunch of workflows? Would you just have to manually recreate them? Nope. There are several solutions that allow you to reuse parts of the workflow. The one I find to be most useful is sub workflows.