Why doesn the Workflow system have a facility for sending emails?
The workflow system is based on Petri Nets which contain places and transitions which are joined together by arcs. The state of a workflow is indicated by the position of tokens on any of the places. When a transition is fired all the tokens are moved from its input place to its output place. Anything other than a place, transition, arc or token is therefore unknown to the workflow system. Each of these transitions equates directly to a transaction (task) on the TASK table of the MENU database, and it is the transaction which actually performs processing on behalf of the application. This processing can be anything you want as the only thing which the workflow system needs to know is when the transaction has been completed so that it can move some tokens. So if you want a workflow to send an email you must create an application transaction (task) with the relevant functionality, and link this task to a transition in a workflow. When that transition is fired the associated task will be
The workflow system is based on Petri Nets which contain places and transitions which are joined together by arcs. The state of a workflow is indicated by the position of tokens on any of the places, which indicate which transition (workitem) is to be fired next. When a transition is fired all the tokens are moved from its input place(s) to its output place(s). The movement of a token might close a case, or it might indicate which transition is to be fired next. Each of these transitions equates directly to a transaction (task) on the TASK table of the MENU database, and it is the transaction which actually performs processing on behalf of the application. This processing can be anything you want as the only thing which the workflow system needs to know is when the transaction has been completed so that it can move some tokens. The workflow system is aware of nothing other than that which is stored in the workflow database. When a workflow case becomes active all it does is move tokens
