Workflow control, my approach

[Electric_Soul]

Hello everybody

I'd like to develop a workflow control. I am tired of coding each possible way of what the next workflow-step might be.

I thought I base the workflow on the records overall status code. A overall status code is nothing else then a combination of status fields. Each field holds a status, like "in process" or "open" or whatever.

Depending on what the overall status is, I can choose, lets say from a dropdownfield, what the next possible action should be. An action will alter a status field and therefore the overall status leading to a new overall satus code. Each action is tied to a script.

All of the overall status codes will be stored in a workflow table. The actions will get their own table, being connected to the workflow table.

Finally, each time an action is executed a script or several will be started. After that I have a new overalle status and new possible actions that I can choose from.

When it comes to define who is actually allowed to alter a record in a specify status, I thought I add a field to a table, called 'assigned_to' which holds an account name or privilegename. This one will be evaluated by a script and the record access control of the internal filemaker securty solution.

Is this a good approach of controlling a workflow? How do you guys do it? How to control a workflow, without coding to much.

Bye

[eos]

Overall your approach makes sense, but I'd create new tables for status and actions and encode all possible stati and actions numerically, indicating their chronological order. Also, each action would additionally have its "parent" statusID.

This way you can fiddle with the names of stati and actions, if you like, while the IDs within the system are preserved; also, the knowledge of which status compasses what steps, and which status follows or precedes another, is embedded within the tables, so your decision algorithms can all be simple math, instead of "manually" querying a list of field.

Connection with the user table via the same system, by entering the respective code for max/min allowed status. If you need more granularity or additional features, think about creating a new join table for USER_STATUS, where you can pack in any number of features, flags and toggles.

[Electric_Soul]

Jup, they are all encoded nummerically. I just kept the explanations simple :

Each status code has 2 numeric charaters. Same with the actions.

So a overall status could be: 05011605

And yes, each status has a parent status and so on. I'll try to visualize my workflows with some recursive functions.

Each status will also hold a layout ID, and emails/email groups, to inform personell and redirect people.

But I do not understand your last paragraph at all. Might be my english : What's the idea behind it?