MDW Assets

Assets consist of documents or artifacts such as process definitions. MDW has features that support the ability for end-users to own and maintain assets in Git. The advantage of maintaining assets this way is that it enables you to quickly responding to evolving business conditions by allowing changes to be enacted in a controlled manner without a traditional application deployment. Assets are stored in a Git repository. Migration into an environment is accomplished by Import and/or Discovery.

Types of Assets

The following are examples of the different types of workflow assets available in MDW:

Common Features

All of these assets can be managed in the same way, with the following built-in capabilities:

Managing Workflow Assets

Workflow assets are designed in MDW Studio or (as long as the user has AssetAdmin role for the target environment) MDWHub. To create a brand new instance of an asset, right-click on an asset package in the project tree, select New, and then the type of asset desired.



The style of editor and default document contents will differ according to the type of asset created, but managing the assets is the same regardless of type. The lifecycle management aspects of workflow assets are viewed and controlled using the Configurator tabs in MDW Studio. To display the Tabbed Properties, right-click on the asset to be managed and select Show Properties from the menu. You can also use an external editor if that's more appropriate. To save a workflow asset to the file system right-click on it and select Export > Export to File. Then after updating the asset in an external editor, import your changes by right-clicking on the asset and selecting Import > New Version (make sure you've got it locked first as described below).

Asset Import

MDW applications need to be able to version their assets and propagate them from one environment to another (dev to test, test to prod, etc.). Asset versioning is achieved by integrating with GitHub (see Asset Persistence). Importing assets from GitHub can be done through MDWHub, or through the MDW CLI to support automation and continuous integration.

TODO: screenshots for MDWHub import from Git, and examples of command-line import shell/build scripts

Asset Discovery

Beyond environmental migrations, assets are meant to be shared and reused across applications. For this purpose MDWHub and the CLI provide a discovery mechanism to locate and import assets from a central repository. The MDW base, db and hub packages are examples of asset collections that can be reused in this way. To discover and import these packages, right-click on your project in Process Explorer view and select Import > Package(s) > Discover.





Attributes

Custom attributes are a way for business users to associate any arbitrary value with workflow assets. A common example of this is a "Certified" flag or equivalent which indicates that a particular version of the asset should be in effect. At design-time the developer specifies which custom attributes are needed (see "Custom" tab below), as well as which roles are allowed to set these field values. Then, during operation, business users with the appropriate role can change the values of these fields. Typically these values are consulted at runtime to control which version of an asset will be in force for a workflow process activity (see Drools Activities for an example of custom attributes in practice).


Custom

For details on how to configure custom attributes in the Custom tab, refer to the help topic Custom Attributes.