Let’s be honest: Workflow in Alfresco is not very user friendly. Almost looks like Alfresco is pretty much exposing the raw BPM. Other than that, the user interface is not designed to handle tasks and processes at scale. As that’s what we are aiming at, we decided to address this first. We started off by trying to leverage datalists code. The good news was that the UI code fits us quite well. Bad news was that it turned out the workflow API is not designed to deal with scale either. Hence, we ended up implementing the “heavy lifting” ourselves.
The following screenshot (click to enlarge) shows a filtered and sorted query.
Yes, the edit action dialog works as well.
Axel pointed out that he implemented task-/workflow indexing and search “abusing” Solr. Just as with the datalists UI, we consider uniformity something to generally aim at. I think I understand where to hook in in order to enable this. Still, not quite sure whether it is not better to use raw Activiti instead.
If somebody reading this has experience pushing BPM in Alfresco (CE or EE) to scale: I’d love to hear about it! I’d also appreciate to learn about BPM improvements which may be underway (The new REST endpoints don’t seem helpful).
As a sidenote, I have resumed work on the extended datalists and I think things are coming along nicely on that front.
By the way: I wonder where (if anywhere at all) forms are headed. They need some ? too. ;)