How to call Workflow - Custom Remote

My previous posts discussed some of the mechanisms to call a workflow process along with their pros and cons. I alluded to how the mode that was desired would determine which business service to call. Workflow Process Manager is the vanilla business process which allows for executing a workflow process in Local Synchronous mode. Siebel provides another business service, Server Requests, which is capable of starting a task in a different component, hence running the process remotely. Unfortuneately, the necessary inputs to this business service must be passed in a child property set, so this business service cannot be called directly from the action of an action set using the business service context attribute. What needs to be done is to is to call a custom shell business service which fills a child property set with the correct attributes, then calls the vanilla Server Request business service.

Let's see how this is done. First of all, a new custom business service needs to be created:

Now create a new custom method for this service:

Finally, create the following method arguments for this new method:

Ok. Now for the script. The script I will about to specify has several features:

• Calls the Server Requests business service which runs a workflow process in the Workflow Process Manager server somponent in its own thread
• Input Properties to the Server Requests business service cannot be passed through the business service context attribute of an Action, as Siebel expects these properties as a child property set.
• Can be called from a Run Time Event-Action by setting all properties as Profile Attributes
• Can be called from a business service or workflow process by setting all properties directly as Input properties
• Takes input properties, either from from profile attributes or from input property set, and passes them as custom input properties to a workflow process.
• Profile Attribute name will be "PassThrough1", for instance, and the profile attribute value must be in the format "", ""
• Can optionally specify a specific application server to run on, otherwise will allow the load balancer to assign the server
• By default, will run in Remote Synchronous mode if user is connected, otherwise will run Remote Asynchronously.
• Can optionally be set to be run as explicitly Remote Asynchronously

This is written in eScript and there are plenty of different ways to go about this, but this is a rough guide (actually, not so rough):