Concepts and terminology overview

The concepts for CfFlow map to those of the OSWorfklow project. Understanding the key terms and concepts below is essential to developing your own workflows with CfFlow.

Key terms list

• steps and statuses
• actions
• results
• conditions
• functions
• workflow instance

Steps and statuses

Workflows are made up of steps. The status of any workflow instance is a combination of the status of all the steps in the workflow. For example, in a split flow, the status of a flow could be “Preparing social media campaign, Preparing Print Copy”. In CfFlow, a step can have one of the following statuses:

• pending
• active
• skipped
• completed

Actions

An Action triggers the transition of step statuses in a worklfow instance. For example, an action might complete the currently active step and set the next step to active. Actions are either defined on a step, or as an initial action on a workflow.

Actions must be defined to be triggered either manually or automatically. Manual actions will require a developer to provide a mechanism for end-users to choose and submit the action, e.g. a button. Automatic actions are triggered instantly, or by timers defined in the workflow, when a step becomes active.

Actions can have zero or more Conditions. The action will only be executed or made available when the conditions evaluate to true.

Step actions

Steps have zero or more actions. A step with zero actions would terminate the workflow.

Initial actions

A workflow has one or more initial actions. The purpose of these is to be able to define how the workflow is started and which step(s) become active when the flow starts.

Action results

Results define the step transitions that occur for an action. Actions must always have a single default, unconditional result. In addition, they may also have zero or more conditional results that are only chosen when a defined condition evaluates to true.

Only one result will be chosen and acted upon.

Functions

Results can have zero or more pre/post functions. These functions are code that runs that can effect the payload and/or state, or just perform some other action like “send email”.