Well I’ve had some fun doing the layout of the workflow onto the state machine designer page. It’s certainly a very different feel to building the Sequential style of workflows and I can understand why anyone who has developed the state machine workflows always says, ‘mess around with Sequential ones first”.
There is a very different feel to the designer when working on the State Machine WF, it feels quite disconnected once you start drilling down into the various state containers and can be a little hard to picture until you return to the top down view and can see the various state changes in line form on the designer.
In order to try the SM workflows out, I’ve decided to port the Finalisaton workflow from our current system into the SM way of working. This fits with the project as the finalisation never reached live owing to the repeated changes requested by our finance team. therefore I’m almost at the blank canvas stage which is a great place to start.
Well so far I have the basic workflow design layed out on the canvas, I’ve got the initialisation underway pulling in both association data and initiation data from the XML data in the workflow, The task logic is almost complete and the task creation is almost there. I’ve had to leave it at the point with copious notes in the code ready for when I can return to it next week.
Watch this space for a report on how the first deployment goes and what I’ve learned about state machines!
