My company has spent thousands of dollars to change our applications to use wM. I am in production support and there is not documentation for these applications (The development team is long gone, they were contractors and my company did not ask for documentation). I understand the basic components in webMethods. But I dont understand the task of workflow in this architecture.
We have, presentation layer (JSP & Java beans) running in weblogic → IS service is invoked from java program → Data mapping is done and through adapters, connection is established to legacy system → After some processing the control is returned to Weblogic and data displayed in the browser.
Can anyone please tell me where Workflow fit in this environment?
Workflow is the WM product used when human interaction is required in a business process. Typically, tasks are placed into a users inbox to be retrieved. The work is represented in HTML or Java thin client forms and advanced through the human workflow until some end state is reached.
It’s pretty tough to tell where Workflow might have been used in the scenario you described. It would not have to be used at all, if there was no human interation required or if that interaction was being provided for in other applications (such as your BEA Java apps).
If your company wants to intervene manually in the Business process ,you use Workflow …As mark said you might or might not require Workflow…
Let me give you an example:
A Purchase order needs to be created in SAP and the IDoc required by SAP needs to be mapped from webMethods.
The Business Process might look like this:
1.Using your presentation layer the user creates a Purchase Order and submits.
Depending upon the Framework you are using ,it invokes webMethods at some point.
webMethods IS does all the mappings using Adapter services,(Common Database Used by the Framework and webMethods) and stores all the values in the Canonical.
4.You do validations for the canonical(A particular field is not present as required )…At this point you might want to intervene manually and change that value from a Presentation Layer(Html or Java Client) and then resubmit the order. Here comes the use of workflow…
After resubmitting the order with the right fields in the canonical,you map the values from the Canonical to Idoc , which invokes a Functional Module in SAP and creates a Purchase Order.
All The above steps can be designed using webMethods Modeler.