Using YAWL Repositories

YAWL 3.0 has a new functionality for storing nets, extended attributes, and data types in repositories. In real life projects it is really important to reuse parts of workflow specifications. One example are extended attributes. The field name of a variable is its technical name by default. If we want to give it a nicer name including blanks or add text above, tooltips, etc. we can do that by giving the variable in a task extended attributes. If the variable appears in ten different places, in YAWL 2.3 we had to do the editing for the extended variables over and over again. This was not only time consuming but error prone. Now the repository concept in YAWL 3.0 tackles this issue. We will build a small workflow to see how it works.

The example is about applying for some post. We define the simple type FormOfEmploymentType as follows:

We define the following net variables:

Technical nameField nameType
postDescPost descriptionstring
formEmplForm of employmentFormOfEmploymentType
stDateStart datedate
availAvailableboolean

The field name is not part of the net variable but will be entered as an extended attribute of the corresponding task variable. We do this now by defining task “Choose post”:

For the variable postDesc we edit the extended attributes by clicking on (=)

Apart from the label, we check that it is a text area and enter some tooltip. We do something similar to the other task variables. We start the workflow to see if all works as expected:

That looks nice – also the tooltips work when we hover the mouse over the fields. Now we will save the extended attributes in the repository in order to reuse them in task “Check availability”. We go back to the extended attributes of postDesc and store it in the repository:

We give it the name of the technical variable and put the same in the description.

Now we are ready to proceed to task “Check availability”. We open it in the editor and pull the required variables inside and adjust their input/output behaviour as follows:

Next we pull the extended attributes for the variables we have already defined and define some for the variable “avail”. We run the workflow to see if it works.

That concludes this short tutorial. The resulting workflow is attached. In the next tutorial we will see how we can import this workflow as a subnet to another workflow using repositories.