This interface defines the resource assignment facility used by the workflow component. A central design issue for this interface is the identification of activites.
The {@link de.danet.an.workflow.omgcore.WfActivity#key "key
" method} of WfActivity
is bydefinition only unique within the scope of the containing process and can thus not easily be used to identify a single activity in a workflow engine. Even worse, a resource assignment service might be used by more than one workflow engine.
At this interface, an activity is therefore identified using an ActivityFinder
and an identifier that is unique with respect to the ActivityFinder
. The ActivityFinder
provides both a namespace to allow different consumers to request resources and a means for the assignment facility to map the identifier back to an actual WfActivity
object. See the description of {@link ActivityFinder ActivityFinder
} for more details.
From the workflow engine's point of view, the resource assignment service is the only source of objects of type WfResource
and WfAssignment
. Implementations of resource assignment services may be (but need not be) based on a resource management service as defined in package {@link de.danet.an.workflow.spis.rms de.danet.an.workflow.spis.rms
}.