I wrote this a while back on my old blog, and have only just got round to moving it here…

Some time ago, I started to look into the functionality behind the “Expedite” button in the Workflow monitor, just to see a bit more about what it actually did.  This became more important with release 2.6.3 of Workflow, where the button was replaced with the “Rewind” functionality – which is in no way a substitute for it.  Finally, I’ve got round to writing my findings up as a technical white paper.

The white paper makes (I think) interesting reading – it shows exactly how you can jump from one activity in a process to another one, whether they are linked together in the process flow or not.  I’ve also written some code that allows you to jump to another activity based on the activity ID, or failing that, you can specify the name of the activity instance, item type and process name, and the code will jump to that point in the process flow for you.

A recent client of mine had exactly this requirement – based on some other process logic, they wanted to jump to a completely different point in the process.  Whilst this is possible to do diagrammatically (and this is normally the best practice to employ, for sure), in certain circumstances it involves over-complicating the process flow a great deal.  In the past, I worked with a customer who wanted to implement a notification at the start of the flow, which allowed the responder to jump to any other activity in the process, so that everything could be revisited at any time – after much more business analysis, we decided that this wasn’t something that they really wanted to do, it was just a management idea of “wouldn’t it be nice if…”, without any business need.

I’ve uploaded the following files as part of the white paper here:

• Technical White Paper
• Sample Workflow definition file for testing purposes
• Example code
• ZIP file containing the three separate files

The code is provided without any warranty, etc. etc. – please feel free to use it, but remember to give credit where credit is due

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Oracle, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.