The GXtips keeps moving forward with clear and practical advice that simplifies tasks when working. On this occasion, Daniel Márquez Lisboa, GeneXus Technical Writer, explains what a Workflow is, and how it can be used from GeneXus Rocha IDE.

With the release of Beta #1 of GeneXus Rocha, developers may find the tool allowing for automation of the multiple task flows currently performed, integrated into the GXflow Development Environment. And what is a Workflow? It is no less than a set of tasks, ordered in a certain sequence, which define the process of resolving situations manually or automatically.

This automation makes it possible to separate the flow control logic from the application logic, achieving flexibility when maintaining the application.

How do we know when to apply a Workflow?

The best way to understand what a Workflow is and when to apply it, comes by means of examples that allow us to establish use cases. A quite simple one may be the case of booking an airline ticket. It consists of entering data into the reservation system through an operator; if the customer is not registered, registration is automatically performed by the system. In any case, then it checks the availability for a specific reservation. If the reservation is available, the process ends; otherwise, control returns to the first step for data modification.



This simplified example consists of only a few steps that are well communicated, diagrammed and without inconsistencies, with an information flow (in this case, in both ways) where presumably more than one person is involved, and with the need to reduce task times. This is the relevance of a Workflow: to automate automatable controls with minimum human intervention. Simple steps allow a developer to build strong Workflow applications in GeneXus.

Subsequently, the idea behind a Workflow process is to obtain, by means of a correct integration of the tools available (in this case from GeneXus), a close collaboration among all possible information systems existent within a company, thus leading to accelerated administrative processes and to a boost in business, dynamically and vertically.

For more information the complete document is available at the Community Wiki.