John, I'm trying to figure out the most sensical semantics for my REST interface, and need a little bit of guidance on this. As, you know, REST has four or five operational verbs for any particular resource: create, update, read, delete, and list. The update, read, and delete verbs generally take an identifier that specifies which instance of the resource they're dealing with.
My resource here is a 'Workflow', which corresponds to an instance of a running process definition. Its REST behaviour is as follows: list -- Shows a list of all running workflows along with their status. create -- Launches a new instance of a workflow. This takes two input parameters which specify the process definition to use, and the initial data for the workitem to feed into the workflow. read(id) -- Shows the process status for some particular workflow. The id is the workflow id of the process. delete(id) -- Cancels a process and does whatever else needs to be done to delete it. update(id) ---- now this is where I'm feeling confused. My intention was to use this method to allow for updating the data of some workitem sitting in a storeparticipant, waiting to be updated. However, to do this, I need only three pieces of information: the name of the store participant waiting for an update, the flow expression id of the item to be updated, and the new data used to update the workitems attributes. I do not need an workflow id here at all. To me, the fact ath I don't need a workflow id suggests that I'm not really updating a workflow resource -- I'm updating something else... a participant, a workitem... I don't know. So maybe this is where trying to use a "Workflow" as my REST resources breaks down? Maybe my REST operations should be centered around a difference concept than the "Workflow"? Can you suggest something? On the other hand, maybe using a "Workflow" as the resource isn't wrong... only that a workflow system doesn't quite lend itself to CRUD operations, and it's okay to bend the meaning of the REST verbs here.... What do you think? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenWFEru dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/openwferu-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
