About Workflow Bundle

If you ever needed to implement certain parts of your symfony2 application in a workflow fashion (like a payment state machine or a cms publishing flow), you came to the right place.

This bundle was built upon Sebastian Bergman's ezcWorkflow component. Before start, we strongly recommend you to understand the concepts behind it (otherwise, your are gonna fell a little bit lost to define your own workflow).

Installation

1. Add the requirement yuriteixeira/workflow-bundle in your composer.json and run composer update:
2. Register the bundle on your AppKernel.php, by adding new Yuriteixeira\WorkflowBundle\WorkflowBundle() on $bundles array.
3. Run php app/console. You should see a section called yuriteixeira there with workflow related commands.
4. Run php app/console doctrine:schema:update to add the tables needed by our workflow in your database.

All right! Let's get our hands dirty.

Usage

Generating your own workflow

This bundle intended to make your life easy. So, instead of give you complex instructions of how to create your workflow manually, we took this boring and error-prone job from your hands!

All you have to do is run yuriteixeira:workflow:generate. This code generator will generate all the needed file structure, update your AppKernel and boom, your just need to customize the code to your needs.

Understanding the generated files structure

├── MyWorkflow
│   ├── Action
│   │   ├── CheckResultAction.php
│   │   ├── DoSomethingAction.php
│   │   ├── WorkflowBeginAction.php
│   │   └── WorkflowEndAction.php
│   ├── Command
│   │   └── GetWorkflowImageCommand.php
│   ├── DependencyInjection
│   │   ├── Configuration.php
│   │   └── MyWorkflowExtension.php
│   ├── MyWorkflow.php
│   ├── Resources
│   │   └── config
│   │       └── services.yml
│   ├── Service
│   │   └── MyWorkflowService.php
│   ├── Tests
│   │   └── Integration
│   │       └── Service
│   │           └── MyWorkflowServiceTest.php
│   ├── WorkflowDefinition.php
│   ├── WorkflowExecution.php
│   └── WorkflowExecutionFactory.php

Important namespaces and classes:

• WorkflowDefinition.php - Here you define your workflow in the ezcWorkflow way (Define a workflow through php code instead of a simple YAML or XML way is a little bit odd, but I promise to make it up soon).
• Service\MyWorkflowService.php - Here you define your core functionality, that will be accessible by your Action classes. This class will be managed by Symfony's Dependency Injection Container, and it's id can be found on Resources/config/services.yml
• GetWorkflowImageCommand.php - This CLI Command exposes, in this case, workflow-my-workflow:generate-workflow-image, that generates a graphical representation of your workflow definition, like this:

Customizing the workflow definition

Out of the box, after you generated your workflow, there is a workflow definition to exemplify how to do it in WorkflowDefinition.php.

Your workflow business should reside on MyWorkflow\Action namespace. Just follow the examples and you will be good.

Change the WorkflowDefinition class according to your needs (check this tutorial to know how to link your workflow nodes).

Starting

Each workflow you generate has a service exposed on Symfony's Dependency Injection Container. Check it's name on your workflow's services.yml file. Supposing that it's name is workflow.my_workflow, to start it inside a Controller:

$this->get('workflow.my_workflow')->startNewWorkflowExecution();

Resuming paused workflows

Workflows can be paused and resumed arbitrary.

To pause it, inside your Action class run method, return false instead of true.

To resume it, run yuriteixeira:workflow:resume.

Techinal Debits (you may help here!)

• Tests
• Build tasks (phpcs, phpmd, code coverage, etc)
• Add repo to Travis CI
• Resume workflows through resumeWorkflowExecution($executionId) method of service
• CLI argument to resume only one workflow

Future features

• Define workflow through a YAML config
• Be independent of workflow-database-tiein, that limits the options of database drivers (should use PDO/DBAL)
• Be independent of Sebastian Bergman's ezcWorkflow (it is awesome, but I would like to modernize and simplify it a lil bit)