Process Views outside viewflow.frontend

Question

I want to integrate processes, starting them etc., outside of the standard viewflow.frontend. To do I have been trying to create a simple page where I can start a new process, but have been struggling to find a way to implement it.

One approach was to defined a url to url('^start_something, CustomStartView.as_view()) with CustomStartView subclassing CreateProcessView from viewflow.flow.views.start. This ended in getting error after error, whenever I fixed one. I am quite sure now that this isn't the right way to do it, also because the View is used as a parameter of the Flow class itself and probably needs to be used differently than a common view.

What is the right way to do it?

Answer 1

The Viewflow views need to be parametrized by flow_class and flow_task instance. So you can include a start view as following::

url('^start/', CreateProcessView.as_view(), {
     'flow_class': MyFlow,
     'flow_task': MyFlow.start})

To add a task view URL config, you need to use process_pk and task_pk parameters

url('^(?P<process_pk>\d+)/approve/(?P<task_pk>\d+)/', ApproveView.as_view(), {
     'flow_class': MyFlow,
     'flow_task': MyFlow.approve
})

For each node, you also can enable detail, and various actions URLs, ex:

url('^(?P<process_pk>\d+)/approve/(?P<task_pk>\d+)/detail/', DetailTaskView.as_view(), {
     'flow_class': MyFlow,
     'flow_task': MyFlow.approve
}),
url('^(?P<process_pk>\d+)/approve/(?P<task_pk>\d+)/cancel/', CancelTaskView.as_view(), {
     'flow_class': MyFlow,
     'flow_task': MyFlow.approve
}),

All of that's a big cumbersome.

Recommended way

You can just include Flow.instance.urls that contains all URLs collected and ready for inclusion into an URL config.

url('^myflow', include(MyFlow.instance.urls, namespace='myflow'))

And at the last, to enable task list views, you can put URL entries manually, ex

url('^myflow/inbox/', TaskListView.as_view(), {
    'flow_class': MyFlow}, name="tasks")

or just use as viewflow.flow.viewset.FlowViewSet class

myflow_urls = FlowViewSet(MyFlow).urls

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^myflow/', include(myflow_urls, namespace='myflow'))
]

This is the recommended way to include viewflow URLs into a django URL Config. To customize views used in that URL config, you can subclass the FlowViewSet class and provide views in the nodes definition, ex

class MyFlow(Flow):
    start = flow.Start(detail_view_class=MyDetailTaskView)

For the sample usage, you can checkout the Viewflow Custom UI cookbook example - https://github.com/viewflow/cookbook/tree/master/custom_ui