The Design And Development Of The Workflow Engine Management System Based On Relational Database

The workflow engine management system is a software system which is supported by a computer and aims to study the automatic or semi-automatic business process of the distributed, collaborative work. It mainly provides the users with services related to the workflow control in process services, using the request/ response model—to accept a request sent by the client, to respond, and to return the results requested.Workflow engine embedded in other applications, the applications can flexibly set the business processes related to the problem domain, reduce the development costs of the business scene of workflow, improve the maintainability, the scalability and the flexibility of application.This thesis analyzes requirements, general design, database design and development of the workflow engine management system. The overall idea is to save the XML analyzed by the workflow definition into a relational database. Then the workflow instance and the workflow activity instance will be saved into relational databases respectively, when the workflow is running.On this basis, the relevant functions of the access to the relational database will be realized through the encoding. The design primarily includes:the generation of the workflow definition and the analytical design in running, designing the workflow in a graphical way and transforming into the workflow definition expressed in a xml way, then analyzing the workflow definition by the workflow engine module into the workflow object running; designing the execution of workflow, promoting the execution of workflow by defining a common set of workflow activities of the action and the call page as the backing, and being able to save and restore the execution scene during the execution; monitoring and handling the execution of workflow, monitoring the status of the workflow's execution in running and doing human intervention when necessary; managing the workflow system permission, the module authenticate the identity of the caller, managing the caller's information when running; designing the system fault-tolerant, dealing with all possible errors, and restoring the system real-time from from the error state to the normal operating state; designing the call interface, providing a group the call interface used by a third party.The system includes such capabilities as a workflow design, workflow issue real-time, workflow execution and workflow monitoring. It can provide functions related the workflow for other applications system.