Question

How would you orchestrate a business process with workflow that has multiple intros and outros?

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I'm honestly fairly new to Workflow, but I believe for my next (/current) project Workflow is my best bet. I want to model a business process that has multiple intro's and outro's and I'm curious what's the best way to achieve such thing. As far as my knowledge reaches, I thought that workflow always had a single entry point. A little clarification in regard to multiple intro- and outro's: One could say there are multiple processes, instead of a single one, but instead have overlapping activities. This is also true. An entry point could be a scheduled event or a manual action or another activity. The choices made by the user will decide which path will be taken. See the image below for additional clarification. Each left yellow block is a trigger/starting point (manually or automated by scheduled event). All following blocks activities, except for the gray ones. Those are, similar to Mendix, splits depending on the condition. Based on the above clarification and image, how would you structure your workflow(s)? As you can see in the image, there are multiple starting points, but many of them can merge into the upmost flow. I was wondering what's the best way to develop this process in Mendix. Since I have multiple start triggers, do I need multiple workflows? And since there is overlap, should I be creating 'sub workflows'? Very curious how others would go at this challenge.

asked 2025-01-06

Sander Schaeffer

1 answers

Paul · Answer 1 · 2025-01-23

Hi Sander,

Implementing the boundaries of the workflow can be different per platform. In Mendix, the logic that triggers the initiation of a microflow is either a microflow (e.g. scheduled event) action or a page/UI action (user selects item/presses a button). This is the same behavior as you mentioned in your example.

Since workflow typically represent business scenario's, I suggest to make it more explicit in the workflow which of the 4 paths have to be execute. You can do this by adding a "Decision" activity with 4 outcomes as first activity in the workflow.