CQ5 - displaying a CQ.Notification in the frontend, when a workflow finished - aem

Question

I implemented workflows, but it would be nice to know if there are hooks provided by the client library which allow to hook in. When a workflow was triggered and finished, a CQ.Notification should be displayed. Or do i need to implement a polling library by myself?

Answer 1

As far as I know, there is no built-in CQ area to see when something is done, aside from looking here:
http://yoursite.com:port/libs/cq/workflow/content/console.html
Once there, you can go to the 'Instances' tab and see what's happening.
In one application that I worked on, we ended up writing our own method that sends notifications to us based on one of our workflows (our workflow ties into it - from the workflow models area, you can set your process to be a servlet that you've put into CQ). Here is the main piece of code from our servlet that catches the process being active, and then calls our methods to email us based on what it finds:
import com.day.cq.workflow.WorkflowException;
import com.day.cq.workflow.WorkflowSession;
import com.day.cq.workflow.exec.WorkItem;
import com.day.cq.workflow.exec.WorkflowData;
import com.day.cq.workflow.exec.WorkflowProcess;
import com.day.cq.workflow.metadata.MetaDataMap;
import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Component;
import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Properties;
import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Property;
import org.apache.felix.scr.annotations.Service;
import org.osgi.framework.Constants;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import javax.jcr.Node;
import javax.jcr.RepositoryException;
import java.util.Arrays;
public class YourServletName implements WorkflowProcess {
#Override
public void execute(WorkItem workItem, WorkflowSession workflowSession, MetaDataMap args) throws WorkflowException {
session = workflowSession.getSession();
final WorkflowData data = workItem.getWorkflowData();
String type = data.getPayloadType();
String[] argStrings = args.get("PROCESS_ARGS", ARG_UPDATED).split(",");
String reason = argStrings[0];
String baseUrl = argStrings[1];
try {
if (type.equals(TYPE_JCR_PATH) && data.getPayload() != null) {
String resourcePath = data.getPayload().toString();
logger.info("Send Notification that {} has been {}.", resourcePath, reason.toLowerCase());
if (resourcePath != null && !resourcePath.isEmpty()) {
ResourceInfo resourceInfo = new ResourceInfo(resourcePath, baseUrl);
sendEmail(resourceInfo, reason);
}
}
} catch (EmailException ex) {
logger.warn("Failed to send Email");
throw new WorkflowException(ex);
} catch (MailingException ex) {
logger.warn("Failed to send Email");
throw new WorkflowException(ex);
}
}
}
You can find more info in the documentation for Extending Workflow Functionality.
Look at the first code block on that page, and that will give you the best idea of how you can implement a custom workflow handler.
EDIT
If you want to see it on the front-end, you could do an AJAX call to get the JSON list of currently running workflows - you can hit this url:
http://localhost:4502/etc/workflow/instances.RUNNING.json
Then you could loop through them and see if yours is in there. This isn't very nice though, since they are all just listed by IDs. I would instead suggest using the querybuilder, or again, just doing an AJAX GET. This is one example:
1_group.0_path=/etc/workflow/instances
2_group.0_type=cq:Workflow
0_group.property.2_value=COMPLETED
0_group.property=status
0_group.property.and=true
3_group.property=modelId
3_group.property.2_value=/etc/workflow/models/your-model-name/jcr:content/model
3_group.property.and=true
Then the URL would look something like this:
http://yoursiteurl:port/libs/cq/search/content/querydebug.html?_charset_=UTF-8&query=http%3A%2F%2Fyoursiteurl%3Aport%3F%0D%0A1_group.0_path%3D%2Fetc%2Fworkflow%2Finstances%0D%0A2_group.0_type%3Dcq%3AWorkflow%0D%0A0_group.property.2_value%3DRUNNING%0D%0A0_group.property%3Dstatus%0D%0A0_group.property.and%3Dtrue%0D%0A3_group.property%3DmodelId%0D%0A3_group.property.2_value%3D%2Fetc%2Fworkflow%2Fmodels%2Fyour-model-name%2Fjcr%3Acontent%2Fmodel%0D%0A3_group.property.and%3Dtrue
It's ugly, but it gets you the results you need, and then you can parse them to get further information you need.