Monthly Archives: April 2012

A client of mine wanted me to build an online form using Oracle APEX that, while fairly simple in design, had a fairly complicated workflow associated with it.

Each document had to flow through many different approval levels, and at each point, the possible actions a user could take would differ.

At first glance I thought I’d just manually create a lot of different buttons on the page and use various authorization schemes to display or hide them depending on document status and user role. I did not look forward to this task, considered the likeliness of the workflow changing (high!), and thought there must be a better way.

What I ended up doing was translating the workflow into table form based on the current document status.

TBL_STATUS_WORKFLOW

ID number;
CURRENT_STATUS number;
NEXT_POSSIBLE_STATUS number;

Both CURRENT_STATUS and NEXT_POSSIBLE_STATUS are foreign keys to a TBL_STATUS table, that looks like this:

TBL_STATUS

STATUS_ID number;
STATUS_DESCRIPTION varchar2;
BUTTON_REQUEST varchar2;
BUTTON_LABEL varchar2;

Say, for example, my document is in DRAFT mode (status). My workflow says that a document that is still in ‘Draft’ can go either to ‘Submitted to Level 1′ status or ‘Withdrawn’. Ideally, at this point, I would like to display 2 buttons to my user: ‘Submit to Level 1′ that would trigger a status change and email to appropriate party, and ‘Withdraw’, which would also trigger a status change.

My tables look something like this (small sample only):

TBL_STATUS

To translate my workflow and indicate that the document can move from Draft to either Submitted to Level 1 […]