Forum OpenACS Q&A: Adding workflow to a package (and acs-service-contracts too)

Hi all,

I'm currently working on adding workflow to the project-manager.

There are a couple of learning curves involved here:

  • Learning how to add workflow
  • Learning acs-service-contract
I'm documenting the process I've gone through here:

Adding workflow to a project

I hope to make this the definitive tutorial on how to add workflow to a project. Lars' documentation is very good, but it is still a bit over my head.

If you're familiar with Workflow, and especially if your name is Lars, would you mind looking at this document, and providing suggestions for the next step? I'm stuck with defining the service contracts, and also with making sure that my workflow definitions are correct.

Also, if you're familiar with service contracts, I'm trying to create the documentation for how to do them. I've seen the several postings here, but I think the next step is some sort of tutorial. I'm doing it now, so I might as well document how to do it for posterity.

Using ACS service contracts

Specifically, my questions are:

  • Is my workflow defined correctly so far?
  • How do I take the next step and define the service contracts that workflow requires?
I know that I can go through the code and eventually figure this all out. That's probably how all of you did it. And until I hear back from anyone, I'll probably have to do this. But it would save me a lot of time if you could help out here, and as a bonus, there will be documentation for posterity. It's always nice to help out when you know you're not just helping one person. 😊
Be sure to use the new-ish Tcl API to define your service contracts.  Not only is the declarative style easier to read but it works for both Oracle and PG ...
About a week ago, I wrote a little introduction to Service Contracts that I circulated to some of my coworkers.  I'm still a newbie when it comes to service contracts, but I hope my document is enough to get people started.

I wrote my document referencing the pl/pgsql version of service contracts, because I thought it would be useful to understand the mechanics behind the contracts.  With that understanding the tcl api is easy to grasp.

It is still a first draft, but you can see it here:

http://vrusp.com/intro-to-service-contracts.html

Thank you both for your help. Benjamin, your document on service contracts is exactly what I was looking for. Please let me know if you ever plan on taking it from its present URL -- I'd be happy to host it (with full credit to you of course) if you ever need to take it down.

I think that helps me get started with service contracts. Thanks.

Benjamin, *great* tutorial! Thank you very much for making it available. I plan to add new functionality into service contracts. Unfortunately, I cannot give a firm deadline for this one but I can say that it will be before the end of the summer and it will solve service contracts revision issues and provide more flexibility to the designer. I'll post an RFC soon.