Today during Patterns and Practices Summit Ted Neward gave a presentation on Windows Workflow Foundation. One of the points he made is that although "Workflow" as a programming concept is fairly old (arguably older than object-oriented programming), WF as a product has been out for less than a year. Thus, it is premature to talk about best practices and proven patterns.
I agree with Ted, and in this post I'd like to share my experience designing real-life systems that take advantange of WF. As an architect, I had to choose the niche for this shiny new technology. It wasn't an easy task, because WF represents extremely flexible and universal concept. On the other hand, it is a new technology, so I wanted to minimize the risk and not use WF as a cornerstone of the system. Instead, it should be pluggable, something that's easy to turn off.
Job Orchestration
Imagine an application that prepares and sends a file to several business partners, then waits for response files and processes them. Even assuming fully automated file upload/download, the whole thing can take hours or days. My original approach was to write separate jobs that handle individual tasks, such as preparing request file, processing response file, upload, and download. It worked, but it was difficult to reconstruct the business process from individual job results. In other words, we know that a job has executed successfully, but business users wanted to know where do we stand in the larger process.
In order to solve this problem, I used WF's ability to implement long-running workflows. I represent a process with a workflow that contains the sequence of job launch activities. After a job is launched, workflow idles and is persisted to SQL data storage using SqlWorkflowPersistenceService. When job completes execution, it sends a signal to workflow runtime, which loads correct WorkflowInstance from SQL and resumes it. Note that workflow itself doesn't contain any code whatsoever and can be written in pure XAML - it represents a logical sequence of jobs.
Business users were particularly pleased to see the Visio-style diagram of the workflow which clearly showed what's completed, what's running, and what's pending. For this I used the ability of WorkflowView control to save itself as an image.
[To be continued]
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