Documentum Workflow: Queue Management

Overview
In Workflows, each work item or task has to be managed, maintained and tracked. As workflows are executed and performed, there are certain aspects of managing these tasks that are not straight forward and are definitely not offered out-of-the-box with Webtop.

Management:

Issue:
Work queue tasks could be acquired then left unattended unless a scheduled job runs to determine whether the user who acquired the task is still using the system or has left for the day.

Solution History:

First Attempt:
The first fix was to customize the logout functionality of Webtop to set the work item (task) to the “putback” auto-activity. The “putback” auto-activity then gets the work item’s sequence number and subtracts 1 from it and sets the work item back to the previous activity.

First Attempt Issues:
This does not take into account user’s who X out of their browser without logging out. It also doesn’t scale.

Follow Up Attempt:
We decided to create a scheduled job which would execute a java method that “unacquired” the work items, like the “unassign” functionality in the Work Queue Monitor page on Webtop. This required some reverse engineering of the existing unassign class to figure which services and api’s were used and the objects and jars required. This also required looking at DA’s User Session functionality and bringing that in as well. Here are the components of this solution:

Documentum Objects
dm_job
dm_method

Java classes

Class: public class TimeoutPutBackMethod implements IDmMethod

Methods:

execute(Map params, OutputStream output)

- This is the main dm_method execution method which excepts parameters sent from the job and an output stream which ends up as a report written to the “Temp/Jobs// log files.

getAllActiveSessions(session, output)

- This method uses DfSessionCommand object to get all of the active sessions on the repository.
- This also queries the a_held_by (Username who acquired it) values of the work items to figure out which work items should be unassigned.

unAssignWorkflowTasks(IDfSession session, String UserName, String sDCTMDocbase, OutputStream output)

- Calls the getWQName method to lookup the work queue name based on the activity name.
- Calls UnassignQueuedTask.unassignTasks

getWQName(IDfSession session, String ActivityName)
- queries the dm_activity table looking for the performer (work queue name) based on the activity name.

Class: public class UnassignQueuedTask

Method:
unassignTasks(IDfSession m_session, String m_taskId, String m_queueName, String m_docbase, OutputStream output)

- This method constructs a work queue manager service and work queue object to unassign the work item.

Non-standard APIs used
import java.io.OutputStream;
Used for outputting strings to a job report file.
import com.documentum.services.workqueue.IWorkQueue;
This is used to construct a workqueue and unassign it
import com.documentum.services.workqueue.IWorkQueueMgmt;
This is used to construct a workqueue manager service
import com.documentum.mthdservlet.IDmMethod;
Used to implement this method and to be able to execute it as a dm_method object
import com.documentum.admin.commands.DfSessionCommand;
This is used to get all of the active sessions in the repository