Workitem Linking

Outbound Workitem Links

To set a new linked workitem in a form, you can use the custom formpart ‘workitemlink’. See the following example:

<item name="project.ref"
      type="custom"
      path="workitemlink"
      readonly="false"
      options="$workflowgroup:Projekt"
      label="Project:" />

The user can enter a search phrase to search for a workitem within the index. With the attribute options an optional search filter can be applied. The tag name is used to hold a list of linked workitems of this type.

If you set readonly="true" the formpart shows only a list of linked workitems.

The workitems linked from a workitem are called outbound workitem links.

Inbound Workitem Links

While outbound workitem links describe the workitems that a workitem points to, inbound workitem links define the reverse relationship: They show all workitems that reference the current workitem.

When Workitem A references Workitem B (through an entry in $workitemref of Workitem A), then:

• Workitem A has an outbound link to Workitem B
• Workitem B has an inbound link from Workitem A

Inbound links are not stored explicitly but are determined dynamically via the index. To find all workitems that reference a specific workitem, use the following Lucene query:

(type:"workitem") AND ($workitemref: "<$UNIQUEID>")

Here, <$UNIQUEID> is replaced with the actual $uniqueId of the workitem for which you want to retrieve the inbound links.

This query is particularly useful to:

• Identify dependencies on a workitem
• Check if a workitem is still referenced by others (e.g., before deletion)
• Get an overview of all assigned or linked processes

Unlike outbound links, which are actively maintained by the user, inbound links emerge automatically from the references of other workitems.

Display Inbound Workitem Links

To display a list of inbound linked workitems you can use the formpart workitemlink_inbound

<item
      type="custom"
      path="workitemlink_inbound"
      readonly="false"
      options="$workflowgroup:Projekt"
      label="Project:" />

Note: The inbound linked workitems can only be referred by the item $workitemref. The attribute ‘name’ is in this case not relevant and will be ignored.

<item name="payment.ref"
      type="custom"
      path="workitemlink_outbound_table"
      options="($workflowgroup:Payment) "
      label="Payments" />

<item name="payment.ref"
      type="custom"
      path="workitemlink_inbound_table"
      options="($workflowgroup:Payment) "
      label="Payments" />

Copy Data

Optional you can copy a list of items from the linked workitem into the current workitem. Therefore use the plugin

org.imixs.workflow.office.plugins.WorkitemLinkPlugin

The plugin can be configured by the following workflow result definition:

<workitemlink name="copydata">
	<ref>payment.ref</event>
	<items>customer.name, customer.number</items>
      <debug>false</debug>
</workitemlink>

This definition copies the items ‘customer.name’ and ‘customer.number’ from the workitem referred by ‘payment.ref’ into the current workitem.

To avoid name conflicts, the item name can be mapped to a different name by separating the new name with the ‘|’ char.

   <items>customer.name|contact.name</items>

In this example the item customer.name will be copied into the target workitem with the new item name contact.name . Copy Items by Regex

The items tag also supports regular expression. See the following example with will copy all items starting with ‘customer.’:

<workitemlink name="copydata">
	<ref>payment.ref</event>
  <items>(^customer\.)</items>
</workitemlink>

A regular expression must always be included in brackets.

Note: In case of a regular expression you can not use item name mapping with the ‘|’ character.

The option <debug>true</debug> prints details of the copy process into the server log

Data Groups & Split Workitems

With the sub project Data Groups you can create linked workitems by a Adapter Class

Also the Split and Join Plugin provides a way to generate outgoing workitem links.