Friday 17 June 2011

ADF Task Flows

A Fusion web application is broken up into a collection of reusable task flows. A task flow represents an activity that is performed when running that task flow.

Task flows can be bounded or unbounded. There can be only one unbounded task flow in an application, which contains the entry points of the application, if the application has more than one. If your application has a single entry point, it is no necessary to define an unbounded  task flow. However, even if empty, an unbounded task flow will always exist as the first  entry on the application's task flow stack.

Some task flow components and their definitions are enumerated below.

Activities
  • View Activities: Display a page or page fragment
  • Flow Calls: Invoke another task flow from within a task flow
  • Task Flow Return Activities: Specify the outcome returned to the caller
Control Flow Cases:  Identify how control passes from one activity to another

Outcomes: Labels on control flow cases representing values that determine the following activity (e.g. values specified in the action attribute of the UI component)

Control Flow
  • Control Flow Rules: Are invoked by components used to implement navigation on pages(links, buttons, trains, tabs, breadcrumbs); Are stored in task flow configuration files
  • Wildcard Control Flow Rules: Global navigation rules(Rules that can be called from any  page)

An example of task flow design using JDeveloper is shown in the following picture. The yellow triangles show that the respective activities do not point to pages yet.

An example of task flow design