Defining Workflow Process Properties
Okay, time for a rant. This is bugging me.
I spend a lot of time with Workflow: EAI work kind of forces that on you. Any moderately complicated workflow process always ends up needing a stack of workflow process properties. The vanilla processes Siebel provide are good examples of this phenomenon. This is understandable, and equivalent to a scripted function justifiably defining a bunch of local variables. So here’s the thing: when working with processes, why do I always see all the process properties defined to be ‘In/Out’? This is equivalent to a scripted function putting every local variable into the function definition. Crazy talk!
For those who don’t know, the In/Out parameter on a process property defines the purpose of the property. The values are In for input properties, Out for outputs, In/Out (the default) for properties that both accept and return a value, and None for those variables just used internally by the process. Pretty clear cut. Setting this parameter properly makes the workflow easier to understand - particularly helping when calling the workflow as a sub-process. Leaving it as the default In/Out value is lazy config, and I’ve seen too much of it. So there. Someone pass the message on to the developers inside Siebel, please.
P.S. While we’re at it: how about using process property types other than ‘String’ and ‘Hierarchy’ - and that ‘Integration Object’ parameter is pretty useful too…
3 comments March 3rd, 2008