Workflow design advice for ASP.Net web application?

Question

My team has been tasked with designing a web application that is workflow driven. I need some advice regarding the design.

The workflows need to be dynamic. Meaning, users can define the workflows through some interface and apply those workflows to a given scenario (The definitions will live in a SQL 2008 Database). The scenarios are defined by the business and will never change. So there may be only 2 types of scenarios a workflow can be defined for. The workflows are not necessarily linear. Some sort of state will drive the workflow. States will also be dynamic, but only exist in a workflow.

I have been looking at examples of workflows and state machines and my head is spinning. I am not sure I want o leverage Workflow Foundation or something we develop. I have seen this and think it may work, but I am not sure the state full implementation will work for us.

Answer 1

You can do this using WF4. I have never used Objectflow so I can't really comment on that but it appears to be an in memory solution and with an ASP.NET web site hosted in IIS that means you will occasionally lose state as IIS recycles and AppDomain. Usually not a big problem as it doesn't happen often but a WF4 InstanceStore will take care of that. It will also allow you to run on a web farm without sticky sessions and have the workflow migrate from machine to machine.

Another nice thing is the workflow designer. Its a WPF control you can rehost in your own app. Not in am ASP.NET or Silverlight app but you can provide a smart client to have users update the workflow definition using the sane designer as you use in VS2010.

The biggest problem with WF4 is the asynchronous execution nature. You will need to use a SynchronizationContext to execute the activities and wait for the workflow to go idle in the new state before you return the resulting HTML to the browser.