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Overview of Notification APIs

Oracle Workflow communicates with users by sending notifications. Notifications may request users to take some type of action and/or provide users with information. You define the notification activity and the message that the notification activity sends in the Workflow Builder. The messages may have optional attributes that can specify additional resources and request responses.

Users can query their notifications online using either the Notification Viewer in Oracle Applications or the Notifications web page in an HTML browser. Alternatively, a user can receive notifications via E-mail. E-mail notifications can include HTML pages as optional attachments. The Notification System delivers the messages and processes the incoming responses.

Notification Model

The notification activities in a workflow process use a list of design-time messages and message attributes. In addition, there are a number of runtime named values called item type attributes from which the message attributes draw their values.

The Workflow Engine moves through the process, evaluating each activity in turn. Once a notification activity is encountered, the engine makes a call to the Notification System Send( ) or SendGroup( ) API to handle the notification.

The Send( ) or SendGroup( ) API looks up the message attributes for the message associated with the current activity. If a particular attribute is of source SEND, its value is looked up from the item type attribute associated with that message attribute as defined in the Workflow Builder. If no item type attribute can be found, the default value of the message attribute is used, if available. If the attribute is of source RESPOND, the procedure checks to see if it has a default value assigned to it.

The message Subject and Body may include message attributes of source SEND, which the Send( ) or SendGroup( ) API replaces with the attributes' current values when creating the notification. If a performer's notification preference is 'MAIL' or 'MAILHTML', the Send( ) or SendGroup( ) API also creates a notification E-mail message. Otherwise, a performer can always view notifications from a Web browser.

If the message includes message attributes of source RESPOND, which are used to prompt the performer for a response, the Send( ) or SendGroup( ) API creates a response section in the notification.

After a user responds, HTML browser or parsing mail agent analyzes the response and updates the respond value by calling the notification Respond( ) API to pass the respond values to the Workflow Engine. The engine then updates the corresponding item type attributes. Also, if one of the RESPOND message attributes is named 'RESULT', its value becomes the actual result of the notification activity.

Respond( ) then calls the Workflow Engine CompleteActivity( ) API to inform the engine that the notification activity is complete and it can now transition to the next qualified activity, as long as a callback function is defined in Send( ).

Note: If a notification activity sends a message that is for the performer's information only, where there are no Respond message attributes associated with it, the notification activity gets marked as complete as soon as the Notification System delivers the message.

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