[cl-dwim-devel] persistent-process and friends

[Kambiz Darabi]

Hello,

I have gathered some requirements for an application which shall
support some business processes.

I saw in dwim-meta-model that there exists already some machinery for
(workflow) processes in form of DB persisted continuations and would
like to know whether I could possibly use them to implement something
like the scenario that I will describe.

The business domain is organisation of a social year for young people
who voluntarily work for some time in a social institution
(kindergarden, nursing home etc.) and have an accompanying educational
programme during this time.

A lot of it is paperwork of requesting documents, checking whether the
documents are returned, writing letters (MS Word template based
standard letters currently filled from an MS Access DB).

I just write down some of the requirements and would be happy if you
could sketch, how the persistent-process part of dwim could be used to
fulfill the requirement:

1) a workflow process should be assignable to a group of workers (not
only to a single subject); something like a 'group post box' where
people from a work group can grab one of the processes to work on them

2) it should be possible to link any number of entities to a process,
so when working on the process, all related entities (organisations,
related people, their addresses etc.) are 'nearby' and the worker
doesn't have to perform additional searches for them

3) it should be possible to have an 'ad hoc' functionality: to be able
to create workflows which consist of a task description, some notes,
some documents, some entities linked to it and send it around to other
people, manually, until the whole process is marked as 'done'

4) it should be possible to take a process out of the 'normal'
workflow into an 'ad hoc' mode for a very unusual case, where
e.g. step 4 of the workflow is to be performed before step 2 and
3. The process is then sent around manually, but later, it is put back
into the normal flow to be completed 'as usual'.

5) it should be possible to have a simple process where the incoming
mail is entered into the system; other processes which are waiting for
arrival of a certain document from a certain person are automatically
'informed' of the arrival, they are changed to reflect the arrival and
put into the next stage

6) at different stages of the process, the UI which is presented to
the users should be limited to only those slots which are relevant for
the current step of the process, e.g. at the current stage, the boss
only wants to see two of the 5 slots of the process and tick off a
check box that says, the process is approved by her (which fills the
3rd slot) with #t


Sorry for the lengthy post and I hope I could express the ideas
clearly. If not, I'll be happy to discuss the details.

Thank you for taking your time.



Kind Regards



K. Darabi