Breakout Session: Event Driven State Machine Workflows

The next session was pretty hard to sit through. The concepts were very easy to grasp and were painfully driven home. I had a hard time understanding the speaker, but that was an accent thing and not his fault.

 

The session was “Developing Event Driven State Machine Workflows”, and dealt with the use of WWF to implement state machine workflow.

 

If you know what state machines are and how they work then this is nothing really new here, just how to implement them in WWF. Here are the highlights:

• There is a template for State Machine workflow.
• You can query a state machine workflow for: A) what current state it is on, B) what transitions are available from the current state, and C) a list of all the states in the flow.  

Yep…that’s it. That’s about all I got out of it. The ability to query the workflow for the above information is good because then your UI can react to this without having to actually know what the states are available when, just what the states are and how to represent them. For his example his UI didn’t have to know that if you are in state X then the buttons to move to state Y or Z had to be turned on. It just queried for it.

 

So, not earth shattering.