Hi,
how about to introduce a "data flow" view in the visual workflow editor?
Currently the dataflow can be seen only via visual studio property editor where activity property bindings are displayed (bindings to other activities, to method call arguments, etc.). So to see the data flow through the workflow, every activity has to be clicked on... pretty tedious and bad overview.
The "data flow" should display:
- relevant properties of activities
- read and writes access/flow to and from other activities, dataexchange service etc.
Maybe it could be even not just a view but an editor where one could define the data flow per Drag&Drop.
What do you think?
Thanks,
Philipp
| | pkonrad | All feature requests for V2 should be posted to the WF Technology Feedback Center.
MS Workflow SDE/T - This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. | | Tom Lake | Thank you for the hint. I'll do that.
But first I would like to hear what the community thinks about such a feature. Do you think such a feature would be usefull and fit your SW development needs?
| | pkonrad | It's an interesting proposition, though I'm not quite sure how it could be fully layed out very well. I guess my main concern is that in essence, WF doesn't really have a concept of a explicit data flow (though as you point out there certainly an implicit one).
While you could probably map out things that "move around" through activity binds, that would only cover a small part of which data (and how) moves through a workflow instance, particularly given that a lot of that could be done "behind the scenes" through code-based assignments (and rules as well).
In this sense, WF is more like regular code (where tracing data flows usually requires deep static and sometimes dynamic analysis as well). BizTalk Orchestrations, on the other hand, would be far simpler to analyze for something like this, since they do have Messages (and Message Flows, to a degree) as first class citizens, but even then it's not always 100% easy to visualize. And I guess this will get much harder in BizTalk 200X :)
Tomas Restrepo [MVP] | | Tomas Restrepo | Thank you for the very good points! I see now the whole difficulty of such a feature.
I agree that a lot could going on "behind the scenes" and static and runtime analysis is necessary to totally capture the data flow.
At the same time I would like to put this question in the room:
Would a partial solution be already of significant aid for the workflow developers? Or does it have to be a 100%-covering solution?
(under a partial solution I mean the possibility to see only the explicit/apparent data flows (e.g. activity property bindings) in the workflow designer)
For the opinion that "it doesn't have to be an all covering solution" speak the following two thoughts:
- The workflow designer shows also only the explicit control flow (e.g. sequences of activities). The activities and methods which are manually called in code, rules etc. are also not displayed. So we haven't on the control flow side a 100%-covering solution either.
- The dynamic data flow is far less relevant for the workflow editor since it's mostly used at design time. So we could easily forgo to display dynamic data flows and avoid implementing such a complex feature.
Look forward for all replies
| | pkonrad |
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