Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 7. Business Process Management

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Introducing workflow in Alfresco

• Defining a workflow

• Creating a process definition

• Creating tasks based on the task model

• Customizing the workflow behavior

• Configuring the Explorer user interface

This chapter describes how to create and deploy workflows in Alfresco. It discusses core Business Process Management workflow concepts, including process definitions, how the JBoss Business Process Engine (jBPM) interprets processes, and task models. It also shows you how to configure the behavior of the workflow and customize Alfresco Explorer to view and edit tasks. To illustrate the workflow creation and deployment process, this chapter uses a simple Review and Approve workflow example.

INTRODUCTION TO WORKFLOW IN ALFRESCO

Alfresco implements workflow through several modular, loosely coupled components (as shown in Figure 7-1).

The core components of Alfresco workflows are the workflow engine and the workflow service. The workflow engine is the underlying workflow implementation and is responsible for executing workflows, managing tasks, and managing process definitions. The workflow service is responsible for encapsulating the workflow engine, meaning all access to Alfresco workflows is made through the workflow service. This ensures that Alfresco workflows and services that use Alfresco workflows remain agnostic to the underlying implementation. Though the underlying workflow service API is written in Java, a JavaScript API is also ...