That is the question. I’ve asked that question many times and appoached it a couple ways. In all my time working with Lotus Notes and all the training/conferences attended, not sure I’ve ever seen a step by step way to build a workflow application in Lotus Notes. Even though, I would guess, a workflow application is the most popular type of Lotus Notes app. It’s the sweet spot, No? Workflow applications are one of my favorite types of apps to write or support. First, I see great value in them. They keep work organized, accessible, documented and efficiently moving a process along. They’re people centric and I enjoy working with people, solving this issue.
As an R & D expert (“Rob & Duplicate”), I’ve looked at a couple solutions out there in the Loti world. If you don’t have the budget to buy a solution and you want to build your own, where do you go?
How about a book? The only one I know that has an example and explanation is the book by Mark Elliott titled “Lotus Notes Developer’s Toolbox: Tips for Rapid and Successful Deployment“. (Unavailable at Amazon but I bet it will be available at Lotusphere book store or try IBM Press) 2007
If you get the book, you can download the sample database and check it out. Here’s a screen shot of the navigator and Status view. Workflow apps should always calculate a Status and use the status to show a work queue as this application does.
The main request form has action buttons to make a decision like Approve/Decline/Withdraw and change the status. When you make a decision, there’s LotusScript behind the buttons that change the status and send an email to the requester. I like the way he does the email in that there is an admin function for canned messages where you can maintain the addressee and memo without having to change code. This example is very basic. There’s no multiple approvers and no parallel or sequential workflow. You can improvise from here.
Next post … I’ll take a look at one of my old favorite places to look for examples. The Sandbox.
How do you approach building a new workflow application?
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6 users responded in this post
Why not take a look at Quenos Application Framework on OpenNTF?
Pretty easy to implement and full of nice features…
One of the problems that I have experienced over the years with various workflow tools that use visual workflow maps to configure each workflow is that sometimes you can create a workflow diagram in the workflow map that makes sense diagramitally, but does not allow the workflow to be completed correctly. Text based workflow configuration methods doen’t seem to have this problem.
Also “AND NEXT” workflows seem to work OK but few workflow tools seem to correctly handle “OR NEXT” workflows. The University of Sydney (Australia) did a study a number of years ago that highlighted this problem, and from their investigation of hundreds of workflow tools (at the time), highlighted that only Lotus Notes based workflows handled “OR NEXT” workflows correctly.
I am also amazed that there are so little tutorials on how to build workflow applications based on Notes/Domino. It almost makes me wanne believe Notes is not ment for it.
Even in the long history of The View you do not see such articles.
You can also read that in case you know a good story, send your abstract to the View and maybe they are interested in publishing it.
Or just put it on the web for free!
@Don Yes I’ve looked there a long time ago and I need to check it out again. It just amazes me that there is only an open source solution for this and not an ‘Out of the Box’ template from IBM.
@Patrick I’m amazed too. It’s a sweet spot right? Why no straight forward tutorials? Interesting.
@Ian I’ve not ever worked with a visual tool hands on in Lotus Notes. I’ve seen some vendor demo’s but as a developer I often question if it can all be accomplished without code. Thanks for the comment.
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