In my previous post, I talked about the driving forces toward a scripting solution to workflow behavior, and I presented the following code as an example of such a solution. In this post, I want to focus on the non obvious aspects of such a design.

The first thing to note about this code is that it is very structured. You are working on an event based system, and as such, the input / output for the system are highly visible. It also means that we have straightforward ways to deal with complexity. We can break some part of the behavior into a different file or even a different workflow that we’ll call into.

The second thing to note is that workflows tend to be long running processes. In the code above, we have a pretty obvious way to handle state. We get passed a state object, which we can freely modify. Changes to the state object are persisted between event invocations. That is actually a pretty important issue. Because if we store that state inside RavenDB, we also get the ability to do a bunch of other really interesting stuff:

• You can query ongoing workflow and check their state.
• You can use the revisions feature inside of RavenDB and be able to track down the state changes between invocations.

The input to the events is also an object, and that means that you can also store that natively, which means that you have full tracing capabilities.

The third important thing to note is that the script is just code, and even in complex cases, it is going to be pretty small. That means that you can run version resistant workflows. What do I mean by that?

Once a workflow process has started, you want to keep it on the same workflow script that is started with. This make versioning decision much nicer, and it is very easy for you to deal with changes over time.  On the other hand, sometimes you need to fix the script itself (there was a bug that allowed negative APR), in which case you can change it for just the ongoing workflows.

Actual storage of the script can be in Git, or as a separate document inside the database. Alternatively, you may actually want to include the script itself in every workflow. That is usually reserved for industries where you have to be able to reproduce exactly what happened and I wouldn’t recommend doing this in general.