EMF workflow engine design issue [message #129136] |
Wed, 27 August 2008 10:28 |
Eclipse User |
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I've been working on an EMF based workflow engine. If you have an
interest in the design of an EMF based workflow models, then read on.
Otherwise, these are not the EMF models you are looking for; move along.
I've run across an interesting design issue, and would appreciate any community
feedback.
The current design parameterizes a workflow unit-of-work by storing [parameter,
value] pairs in a hash map as part of the WorkflowContext. The value is
actually wrapped inside an instance of SimpleAnyType which allows it to be a
primitave, or even an EMF object.
It occurred to me this morning that it might be very interesting if the
workflow parameters could map to attributes / references in an arbitrary EMF
model. So instead of storing [parameter, value] pairs, the WorkflowContext
would have a reference to an arbitrary EMF model, and the parameters would have
a reference to maybe an EStructuralFeature (not exactly sure about the
implementation here). The parameter values would then be extracted using the
EMF reflective API.
Should this new idea replace the existing WorkflowContext design, or should the
design be more generic to allow for both? I tend to favor the more generic
design, but it's not currently obvious how to do the implementation. It's also
not obvious how I would extract a value from a Map, or even if this would be
necessary. It could be that the parameter points to the map itself, and you
would have to extend the parameter to understand how to extract a value from
the Map.
If you have any comments or suggestions, please attach them to the bugzilla:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=225892
Thanks.
Bryan
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