Programming .NET 3.5

Building an Incident Support State Machine

In the world of customer support, it's generally impossible to know in advance all the rules to apply to a request. Many companies have tried to make the workflow as sequential as possible, with the use of phone-based routing and resolution of issues. However, in many (most?) cases, customer support calls require some amount of ad-hoc decision making by a human being.

In this next example, you'll build a state machine that will track a support call from an open to a closed state. Over the life of the support call, the incident will be in one of the following states (and no other states; nor will it ever be in an undefined state):

• Call received

• Assigned to phone resolution

• Assigned to a service representative

• Awaiting further information

• Resolved

Your state machine will model these states and the transitions (edges) between them.

Let's get started. In Visual Studio 2008, choose File → New Project and create a State Machine Workflow Console Application. Name it CustomerSupportStateMachine, as shown in Figure 13-1.

You're not going to use Workflow1.cs, so you can delete that file. Then right-click on the project and choose Add → New Item. In the Templates area, choose "State Machine Workflow (with code separation)," as shown in Figure 13-2. Name the file CustomerService.xoml.

Figure 13-1. Creating the customer support state machine

Figure 13-2. Adding ...