SWF and menus

[Christian]

Hi,
I'm currently evaluating SWF and want to check wether it is suitable for a web app I have to develop at work. This web app is a management tool and has a lot of "controlled navigations" that guides the user through a multi-step process. So at the first glance SWF seems to be a good solution.

Unfortunately one requirement for this app is that the user has a menu bar with several links that start diffrent multi-step processes(workflow).

My question is now, is SWF able to handle such a menu? A user could possibly start a worklfow and at any state use the menubar to start another one. Or he could jump to antoher one and then hit the back button in order to continue with the former workflow.

Programming the single workflows with SWF would be a piece of cake , but because of the menubar I'am not sure if SWF is the rigth choice for me.

Can SWF handle those requirements, or is a menu already a killer argument against SWF?

If it's possible to handle the menubar, how do I have to modify the links to keep track of the current state?

Thanks
Chris

[Keith Donald]

Yes, SWF should be able to handle this.

Yes, it seems you'll need to have your menu component know if the user is already participating in a flow (one that should be restored when activated) or if a new one should be started. Perhaps a session-state object storing the _flowExecutionId and _currentStateId for each link would be good enough.

In any case, SWF should be directly leverageable for this problem, though obviously we don't provide such a menu component out of the box.

If you need to support browser back button use, you could use continuations as well.

[klr8]

In general I would not use SWF for the menu itself. All of the flows launched from the menu would be web flows ofcourse.

A user could possibly start a worklfow and at any state use the menubar to start another one. Or he could jump to antoher one and then hit the back button in order to continue with the former workflow.

This requirement seems a bit extreme. This seems very much like "free browsing" and is going to be very hard to do in a web app. There is no problem launching a new flow in the middle of another flow (via the menu - see flowlauncher sample for an example), but jumping back into the original flow is going to be difficult in general.

Erwin