"Grouping" workflow & sub-flow releases

Tue May 20 08:36:34 EDT 2008

Hi Andy,

A tricky alternative you might want to consider (and I borrowed this concept from Alon Raskin!)would be to build in a dynamic task step into your Parent Workflow that would derive the appropriate Sub Workflow Task ID at runtime, based on rules or code.

The limitations with this approach would be the signature of whatever versions of your Workflows that could be called by this dynamic step would  have to maintained consistently with the dynamic step binding.

But at least in this way you could in theory allow the Workflow to start and derive for itself which Sub-Workflow to call at the same point without having to decide up front when the workflow is started.

If you coupled this with a 'GetWorkflowID' Method on a BOR Object the Parent will always know about (e.g. the main object) then in theory the instance of the BOR Object could also influence how it was subsequently treated/used by the Parent Workflow when the step was invoked. This could allow for a complete change in treatment if, for example, by the time the Workflow executes the step the data has also significantly moved on.

Regards,

Mike GT

From: wug at workflowconnections.comTo: sap-wug at mit.eduSubject: RE: "Grouping" workflow & sub-flow releasesDate: Tue, 20 May 2008 12:46:16 +0100

Hi Andy, 

Versioning is good as long as you are only making compatible (version-dependent) changes. This holds true for a single workflow and also applies to your scenario. 

To me it sounds like an incompatible change which would at the very least require a new subflow. I suppose you could build in some logic to detect what version it’s being called from but that’s a bit too much of a sledgehammer approach for my liking. Besides, it takes a couple of minutes to create a copy and plug that into your main flow. 

Cheers, 
Mike

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of Catherall, Andy MSent: 20 May 2008 11:53To: SAP Workflow Users' GroupSubject: "Grouping" workflow & sub-flow releases

Hi all 
I'm curious to see if any cunning work-arounds have been developed for the following example scenario: 
* I have a workflow with a sub-flow. * This subflow is called some-way through the main-flow, and hence there can be several instances of the main-flow active that have not yet got so far as to call the sub-flow.
* I would like to change the design of both the main-flow & sub-flow in some way, such that the new sub-flow design is reliant upon the change in the main-flow design (eg A step in the main-flow does something, a step in the sub-flow now expects that that something has been done).
* If I release these two new workflows into production, there is the following risk: A workflow instance which began when the old design was active now reaches the subflow, but calls the *new* version. As described above, the subflow expects that the mainflow has completed something, but as the old design of the mainflow was being used, this is not correct. Errors will probably now occur.

What would be great is if it were possible to associate subflow versions with mainflow versions so that we could effectively version up the package, rather than just the individual workflow templates. However, I'm not aware of this being available on any version.
Any ideas? 
Cheers Andy Catherall Technical Analyst - SAP Workflow, IXOS & DMS Int: 751 0556 Ext: +44 (0)121 415 0556 Mobile: +44 (0)7813 025481 

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