process gardening

My current objective is the release of OpenWFEru 0.9.17. There are many changes in the engine itself, but not much on its “interface”. There is however an interface that changed a lot, it’s the one of the [demo] web application around OpenWFEru.

The 0.9.16 release of this Densha web application features limited process administration capabilities : pausing/resuming a process instance, cancelling it.

“this business process instance has gone wrong, we have to cancel it”

The upcoming 0.9.17 release (already deployed on the demo web site) adds batch pausing / cancellation of processes and also some “process gardening” tools.

Process instances being execution trees, I’ve made it easy to chop off some branches (currently executing or not yet executed).

The [process] administrator can browse the execution tree of a running process instance and chop off (cancel) branches of it.

“this segment of this business process instance is not required any more, let’s remove it”

The web interface also allows modifying the process variables directly.

Workitems waiting in participant expressions are editable as well (though they could get overriden by the workitem coming back from the participant itself). Modifying the workitem waiting in a sleep expression might be more useful.

The next step for these process gardening tools will be the edition (instead of pure removal) of process branches. It’s already possible programmatically, but packaging that into a web interface is a hard task (will probably have to implement that process designer before). 0.9.17 will probably sport a primitive interface for process modification on the fly.