The MiniPoint Workflow language
January 02, 2014 5:35The workflow language was, for me, the funniest part of MiniPoint. I love working on languages, small or big ones it's not important, as long as they are interesting. In fact, MiniPoint has more than one language/parser: workflows, document templates, AngularJS expressions, ... Most are tiny, but every one makes the code cleaner and the user experience more pleasant.
Take, as an example, the simple boolean language to express visibility of a field on a view; as I mentioned in my previous post, you can make individual fields visible or not (and required or not) using boolean expressions (or, and, not, <, >, ==, <>) over constants and other fields in the view (or in the schema).
The expression is parsed and then analyzed to produce two things: an AngularJS expression, which will be inserted into the ng-required and ng-show/ng-hide attributes to make it work entirely on the client side, and the list of affected fields.
Which is the purpose of this list? Remember that a view is only a subset of the schema, but in these visible/required expression you can refer to other member of the schema as well (from previous views, usually).
AngularJS initializes its "viewmodel" (the $scope) with an ajax request (getting JSON data from a ASP.NET controller); For efficiency, we keep this data at a minimum, which usually is a subset of the fields in the view (readonly fields, for example, are rendered on the server and not transmitted). When we have an expressions, however, fields referenced in the expression need to end up in the $scope too, hence the reason of parsing and analyzing the expressions.
But I am digressing; I will write more about the interaction and integration of AngularJS and Razor (and MVC) in another post.
Now I would like to talk about some aspects of the workflow language that needed a bit of thinking on how to best implement them.
I wanted it to be simple, natural to use (i.e. you can use statements/expressions/constructs wherever it makes sense and expect them to work) but still powerful enough. And have a clean grammar too :)
I wrote some langauges in the past, but this is the first one where statement terminators (';') are optional, and you can just use returns.
The people that are going to write the schemas and workflows (so not the end-users, but the "power-users", or site administrators) have a strong background in ... VBA. Therefore, when a decision about the language came up, I tried to use a VBA-like syntax, to give them a familiar look. So, for example, If-EndIf instead of braces { }.
And I wanted to do it because it was interesting, of course! I had to structure my semantic actions a bit differently, as I was getting reduce-reduce conflicts using my usual approach.
On the surface, you it seems that you have statements (very similar to other programming languages), choices (if-then-else-endif) and gotos. I know.. Ugh! gotos! Bear with me :)
Under the hood, things are a bit.. different. Remember, this is a textual language for a flowchart. So, "step" is actually an input/output block (parallelogram); statements and reports are generic processing steps (rectangles); the "if-then-else" is a choice (rhombus). Therefore if-then-else has a stricter than usual syntax, and it's actually:
Therfore, under the hood you have a list of "steps", which may be a statement list (like "var i = 10"), an input/output step ("step" or "delay"), or a branch.
As a consequence, the language has somehow two-levels; at the first level you have "steps"; then, among "steps" or inside them (look at the if-then-else in the example) you can have expressions and statements like in most other programming languages. The two levels appear quite clearly in the grammar, but I think it's difficult to tell from the syntax. And this is what I wanted to accomplish. Who used it to author the workflows was quite pleased, and used it with no problems after very little training.
Tranlsation to WF activities was fun as well: I built a custom Composite Activity to schedule all the steps; also statements (instead of receiving their own activity) where merged together and executed bu the main composite activity, to improve efficiency (and make it easier to add other statements: a new one does not require a new activity).
Take, as an example, the simple boolean language to express visibility of a field on a view; as I mentioned in my previous post, you can make individual fields visible or not (and required or not) using boolean expressions (or, and, not, <, >, ==, <>) over constants and other fields in the view (or in the schema).
The expression is parsed and then analyzed to produce two things: an AngularJS expression, which will be inserted into the ng-required and ng-show/ng-hide attributes to make it work entirely on the client side, and the list of affected fields.
Which is the purpose of this list? Remember that a view is only a subset of the schema, but in these visible/required expression you can refer to other member of the schema as well (from previous views, usually).
AngularJS initializes its "viewmodel" (the $scope) with an ajax request (getting JSON data from a ASP.NET controller); For efficiency, we keep this data at a minimum, which usually is a subset of the fields in the view (readonly fields, for example, are rendered on the server and not transmitted). When we have an expressions, however, fields referenced in the expression need to end up in the $scope too, hence the reason of parsing and analyzing the expressions.
But I am digressing; I will write more about the interaction and integration of AngularJS and Razor (and MVC) in another post.
Now I would like to talk about some aspects of the workflow language that needed a bit of thinking on how to best implement them.
I wanted it to be simple, natural to use (i.e. you can use statements/expressions/constructs wherever it makes sense and expect them to work) but still powerful enough. And have a clean grammar too :)
I wrote some langauges in the past, but this is the first one where statement terminators (';') are optional, and you can just use returns.
The people that are going to write the schemas and workflows (so not the end-users, but the "power-users", or site administrators) have a strong background in ... VBA. Therefore, when a decision about the language came up, I tried to use a VBA-like syntax, to give them a familiar look. So, for example, If-EndIf instead of braces { }.
And I wanted to do it because it was interesting, of course! I had to structure my semantic actions a bit differently, as I was getting reduce-reduce conflicts using my usual approach.
On the surface, you it seems that you have statements (very similar to other programming languages), choices (if-then-else-endif) and gotos. I know.. Ugh! gotos! Bear with me :)
step ("view1")
var i = 10
if (i + me.SomeField > 20)
i = i - 20
goto view1
else
goto end
endif
//Generate a report, using the "report1" template
report ("report1")
step ("final"): end Under the hood, things are a bit.. different. Remember, this is a textual language for a flowchart. So, "step" is actually an input/output block (parallelogram); statements and reports are generic processing steps (rectangles); the "if-then-else" is a choice (rhombus). Therefore if-then-else has a stricter than usual syntax, and it's actually:
IF (condition) [statements] GOTO ELSE [statements] GOTO ENDIFso that the two possible outcomes are always steps in the workflow.Therfore, under the hood you have a list of "steps", which may be a statement list (like "var i = 10"), an input/output step ("step" or "delay"), or a branch.
As a consequence, the language has somehow two-levels; at the first level you have "steps"; then, among "steps" or inside them (look at the if-then-else in the example) you can have expressions and statements like in most other programming languages. The two levels appear quite clearly in the grammar, but I think it's difficult to tell from the syntax. And this is what I wanted to accomplish. Who used it to author the workflows was quite pleased, and used it with no problems after very little training.
Tranlsation to WF activities was fun as well: I built a custom Composite Activity to schedule all the steps; also statements (instead of receiving their own activity) where merged together and executed bu the main composite activity, to improve efficiency (and make it easier to add other statements: a new one does not require a new activity).