I had the need to put together a simple workflow application and decided to give the Qenos Application Framework a shot. I had seen it sitting on OpenNTF for quite some time but finally decided to take a look after Julian Robichaux gave it some well deserved praise at the OpenNTF BOF during LotusSphere. They’ve recently added some much needed documentation and its pretty easy to get things started.
They have a really slick interface, to start things off you open up their database then click on the “deploy to database” link. Pick whichever database you want to use and off they go importing all the needed forms, subforms, views, agents, etc. A quick field and subform added to your form and your done on the designer side. Back in the Notes client you start up their workflow designer and create states, roles, actions, and notifications (there’s more you can add if you need, but for basic workflow that’s it). The actions are where everything really takes place, you can tell it which roles can access the action and what state the document needs to be in. Then you can have it change the state, send a notification, or just run some code.
All in all I was able to toss together a simple workflow app in under an hour that dealt with moving the document status, sending emails, and changing the author/reader fields along the way.
On another note, Julian released a new version of OpenLog, and as Nathan Freeman says “If you’re not using this tool, well… you suck.” It is quite an amazing tool and with its new addition of a javascript error trapping library and RSS feeds to monitor errors it’s becoming an even more essential for all Domino developers. What are you waiting for? Try it!
- Heavily moderated, SPAM will be dealt with.
Leave a Reply