Overview

This add-on for Zope and Plone aims to provide user-friendly automatically generated documentation about workflow definitions.

Currently the following Zope3-style views for Products.DCWorkflow.interfaces.IDCWorkflowDefinition are provided:

• @@wf-graph: Render an image representing the workflow’s states and transitions as a graph.

• @@wf-doc: Render an HTML page describing the workflow. This includes the graph mentioned above.

• @@wf-doc-user-friendly: Same as @@wf-doc but hides some roles and permissions and the “acquire” column.

• @@wf-validate: Validate the workflow according to a set of general rules.

Requirements

• Tested with Plone 4.3.x. However only Zope 2 is required (hopefuly).

• Graphviz. More precisely: there must be an executable called dot in the system path and the user running Zope must have execute permission on it.

• Other requirements are pure Python packages registered on PyPI and distutils should handle them without problems.

Installation

This package is easy_install’able. Just make it available in your Zope Instance and don’t forget to load its ZCMLs. If you don’t have any idea of what I’m talking about please refer to Installing an Add-on Product.

Usage

Just use the provided views on an workflow definition. Examples (type these URLs in your browser):

• http://localhost:8080/plone/portal_workflow/plone_workflow/@@wf-graph

• http://localhost:8080/plone/portal_workflow/plone_workflow/@@wf-doc

You can pass the following parameters to @@wf-graph in the query string: hide_roles and hide_permissions. These are lists of things to hide in the output, separated by “.”. Example:

• http://localhost:8080/plone/portal_workflow/plone_workflow/@@wf-doc?hide_roles=Anonymous.Authenticated.Member&hide_permissions=Access+contents+information.List%20folder%20contents

There’s also the hide_acquire parameter, which hides the “acquired” column.

To-do

• Render an HTML image map, so the user can click on a state or transition and see its description.

• Test and adapt for Windows.

• Make the location of the dot executable configurable.

• Write automatic tests.

Credits

• Author: Rafael Oliveira <rafaelbco@gmail.com>

• The idea of using Zope3-style views to render information about workflow definitions and to do sanity check on workflows was inspired by Martin Aspeli’s collective.wtf.

Contribute and report bugs

Help is welcome. Contact the author or file a ticket at the Issue tracker.

Thanks

• To lucmult, for reporting the bug #2 (the one fixed in 0.0.3).

History