Ant Organisation Ltd

Workflow

Concept: Workflow definition

Defines the whole structure of a workflow

Workflow definitions describe the structure and behaviour of a workflow, and are stored in the hierarchy.
They are edited using the workflow studio, in the workflow editing view.

An workflow definition in the workflow studio

Each workflow definition contains a number of activity definitions that describe the steps in the workflow.

In addition, a workflow definition contains:

		Name, the name of the workflow;
		Case definition, the definition of the case document structure passed throughout an instance of the workflow;
		Parameters definition, the definition of the parameters that are used to initialise a new workflow instance;
		Escalation workflow and time limit, the definition of the workflow that is triggered when the time limit is exceeded;
		Initial case edit filter, which defines the parts of the case document to edit when starting a new workflow instance.

When a workflow definition is started it creates a workflow instance, which is a running version of workflow definition. Each workflow definition can have many running workflow instances, whereas each workflow instance only has one workflow definition from which it was started.

The hierarchy stores all versions of each workflow definition, each of which can either be published (live) or not. When a workflow definition is started, the new workflow instance uses the latest published version of the workflow definition.

See also: Workflow instance, Segment definition