[daisy] Daisy Questions

[Paul VanWechel]

Thanks for the very helpful answers. I apologize for the long delay in
response - I had a family emergency that forced me to leave the country
temporarily - I just returned earlier this week. For other reasons, the
project was delayed until Q1 next year anyway.


> > 1. Will the planned jbpm support allow the use of the import/export
> > command line tool as a component in a workflow? e.g. other command line
> > tools may optionally be invoked for additional processing on a batch of
> > exported data, with processed data then roundtripped back into the
> > repository. We were unsure if jBPM had a component that supported shell
> > calls though.
> >
>
> the new import/export tools will probably be called 95% of their time
> through the cli, however that didn't prevent Bruno from introducing a
> solid design for those: There is enough separation into separate classes
> there so you can embed calling those from Java easily.
>
> anyway, I'ld like to understand this workflow use-case you're seeing, I
> have to admit export/import was probably one of the last items I would
> expect to be part of the workflow:
>
> In general my own idea would be that typical workflows would be more
> oriented towards coordinating activities amongst document authors, not
> system administrators (import/export is more an administrative kind of
> operation in my head)
>
> Having said that however, I'm not seeing any upfront limitations that
> would prevent having more sysadmin oriented workflow.  Anyways to get
> our thinking straight you might want to share what it is you want to do.


I gave a bad example, I should have explained myself better. We have several
image processing tools called via the cmd line (they do not have java
API's). But the order in which they are piped together is dependent on the
author's needs. This seemed like a great use of  workflow/jbpm (to provide
user driven image processing pipelines), but we were unsure if this type of
use case would be supported. Basically, we have several cmd line tools on
the server that we would like to access from a daisy workflow to allow user
driven processing of different daisy docs/parttypes. So workflows may
generate several new files based on the different parameters tried by the
author through multiple runs of the same workflow template on the same
doc/part. We'd like to be able to reference the source file in the context
of all the derivatives created from it though.



> > of larger batch processing problems (that have task lists in the process
> > flow). Some of the commercial products we have considered, claimed that
>
> interesting, which ones ? :-)
>
> > Daisy would not be able to handle large files using jBPM. We understand
> > workflow support is not included yet, but our project will not ramp up
> > for 1-2 months anyway.


I talked with the team member that had been given the scalability quote -
and it turns out they were eliminated from the selection process anyway.
Despite not being fond of their sales team, we would prefer to not mention
their company name. :)


One additional question, from another person on our team:

When defining a form and a set of fields we are not always sure which forms
will have lots of data several months later. Since Daisy stores all field
values in one table, we were unsure if there was a mechanism for
transparently moving a group of fields out of this table into a separate
schema table in the same database, without any changes to references in
previously defined queries in the daisy query language. A form may have
thousands of instances and for performance reasons it seems necessary to
occasionally make these changes to the schema. If this is not possible, can
we define a separate schema table ahead of time when we anticipate a large
amount of data, and refer to the fields/columns as if they were 'normal
daisy fields' in the query language(?).

Thanks,
Paul
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