Workflows in the SOAP calls

Workflows in the SOAP calls

The following picture represents how the SOAP calls can be implemented using workflow inProcess functionality:

The structure of the Request and response is presented in the image below. 
Soap layer remains unchanged for all soap calls and each type of soap calls is associated with the correspondent inProcess workflow.

RequestDTO contains the hookpointKey which identifies the associated workflow and array of ValueDTO objects. Each ValueDTO object contains the KEY and VALUE. Depending on the subclass used, VALUE can be long, String, double, Data or array of ValueDTO objects.

Soap layer transforms the array of ValueDTO objects into the hash table of context objects with the correspondent keys, provided in the request and starts the workflow with the hookpointKey provided in the request.

After the workflow is executed, hash table with the result objects is passed back to the SOAP layer, which performs the transformation of the result hash table to ResponseDTO object, which is returned as result of the SOAP call.

Requirements for the workflow:

1. Workflows started by the SOAP method should contain only inProcess activities, and be completely executed by the Tomcat, since SOAP methods are synchronous and should return the result with in relatively short period of time.

2. Hash table which is returned as the result of the workflow execution must contain only values of type long, double, String, Date or Hashtable.

3. Hash table which is returned as the result of the workflow execution must contain the values with the following keys used in the ResponseDTO to identify the status of the SOAP call: STATUS, ERROR_LEVEL, ERROR_MESSAGE.

4. In most of the cases SOAP calls are used as a part of direct user interaction so the response time should be fast, which means embedded inProcess workflow should be executed within the corresponding time frames.

Validation XMLs

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