Workflow

This is part 3 of the Maestro for Drupal 8 blog series, defining and documenting the various aspects of the Maestro workflow engine.  Please see Part 1 for information on Maestro's Templates and Tasks, and Part 2 for the Maestro's workflow engine internals.  This post will help workflow administrators understand why Maestro for Drupal 8's validation engine warns about the potential for loopback conditions known as "Regeneration".

The Maestro Engine is the mechanism responsible for executing a workflow template by assigning tasks to actors, executing tasks for the engine and providing all of the other logic and glue functionality to run a workflow.  The maestro module is the core module in the Maestro ecosystem and is the module that houses the template, variable, assignment, queue and process schema.  The maestro module also provides the Maestro API for which developers can interact with the engine to do things such as setting/getting process variables, start processes, move the queue along among many

Templates and tasks make up the basic building blocks of a Maestro workflow.  Maestro requires a workflow template to be created by an administrator.  When called upon to do so, Maestro will put the template into "production" and will follow the logic in the template until completion.  The definitions of in-production and template are important as they are the defining points for important jargon in Maestro.  Simply put, templates are the workflow patterns that define logic, flow and variables.  Processes are templates that are being executed which then have process

We've put together a Maestro overview video introducing you to Maestro for Drupal 8.  Maestro is a workflow engine that allows you to create and automate a sequence of tasks representing any business process. Our business workflow engine has existed in various forms since 2003 and through many years of refinements, it was released for Drupal 7 in 2010. 

If it can be flow-charted, then it can be automated

The Maestro Workflow Engine for Drupal 8 is now available as a Beta download!  It has been many months of development to move Maestro out of the D7 environment to a more D8 integrated structure and we think the changes made will benefit both the end user and developer.  This post is the first of many on Maestro for D8, which will give an overview of the module and provide a starting point for those regardless of previous Maestro experience.

A very common use-case for Maestro is to launch a workflow in order to moderate some piece of content. You may have an expense form as a content type and you wish to have a manager review and approve it before handing it off to other departments for processing.

This post will show you how to fire off a moderation workflow after saving content with Rules.

Step 1: Create a simple test flow

I know you have a super-ultra-complex workflow, but this is best to get off the ground with a simple 1 step flow for the time being!

With Drupal 8 emerging on the horizon, we've started to delve in to our core modules, Maestro and Filedepot, beginning the process of porting them from Drupal 7 to 8. For our Drupal 8 version of Maestro, I have some immediate concerns that I would like addressed, but also some "wish list" items which I feel would bring a great deal of flexibility. A condensed road map, of sorts, for Maestro's first release on Drupal 8 would be:

We already have the ability to create a drupal action to launch a maestro workflow and trigger that action from drupal. Maesto also has a trigger type task that can launch drupal actions from workflows but we did not have rules integration. We also needed a way to better track adhoc new instances of maestro processes with drupal entities like node and users.

Maestro has a content type task that automatically will create the relationship between the content node and maestro proceess information but there are cases where the maestro content type task is not used to create the content entities and we did not have an easy way to later link maestro processes with content nodes or other entities.

The regenerate functionality goes back many years in the history of the Maestro engine.  I wrote the very first instance of the "Maestro" engine back in 2004/2005 where it was nowhere near as flexible and nowhere near as extensible as it is today as Maestro.  That being said, the engine's internals have been updated and upgraded over the years which has culminated in what you see today.  The concept of regenerate and regenerate all live tasks comes from the very beginning of the engine's life and lives today in Maestro 1.0's engine. 

How do I..... ?  is a question we hear quite a bit when it comes to the Maestro API. We have a few very good blog posts on our site and also bundle Maestro with some good example code. However time has come to begin to document how to do a variety of common things with the Maestro API.