Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Heads-up: New Workflow Package

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Posted by Lars Pind on
Dan,

You're right that a graphical representation would be nice. I don't think we have funds to make that happen this time, but we can always add it later, especially if we can find an easier to install tool than graphviz.

/Lars

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Posted by Tilmann Singer on
I would also like to add a comment in favor of the graphical representation, although it might not really be relevant: I found that people were amazed by the automatically generated workflow diagrams of graphviz and it was easy to convince them that the workflow package is an extremely powerful tool, although they didn't fully understand its functionality. So this might be more interesting for marketing than for its actual usefulness ...

Also I didn't find graphviz that hard to install - only the lack of a friendly message 'You haven't installed graphviz, here are some hints what to do ...' but an error page instead was a bit ugly.

I found your idea on the openacs social in amsterdam quite interesting, to generate a copy of a workflow when a new process starts and to store that separately from the original workflow, so that they can be changed without having an influence on already active processes, and also that workflows for active processes can be changed individually. Is this somehow part of your new plans?

And a final minor note against ad_form/ad_page_contract style for defining workflows in tcl: I don't like them for the simple reason that it's hard to add commments in the code.