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SAP Business Workflow — tasks, agents and the business object behind them

Level: 301 · deep dive

Status: stub — the vocabulary is here; the worked example is not yet.

One line: Workflow routes a business object through steps — approve, release, complete — to agents found by rule, with each step a task bound to a method of a business object (BOR or ABAP class), and the ABAP developer's share is the object methods, the events that start a workflow, and the agent-determination rules.

The vocabulary

Term Is
Workflow template (WS…) the flow: steps, conditions, loops, deadlines (SWDD)
Task (TS…) one step, bound to an object method; standard or single
Business object BOR type (SWO1) or an ABAP class implementing IF_WORKFLOW
Event what starts or continues a workflow; raised by the application or by SWE_EVENT_CREATE
Agent who gets the work item; found by rule (PFAC), org unit, or expression
Work item one instance of a task in someone's inbox (SBWP, Fiori My Inbox)
Container the data passed between steps
Flexible workflow the S/4HANA successor: scenario-based, configured in Fiori, fewer templates

Monitoring: SWI1 (work items), SWI2_* (selection reports), SWEL (event trace, switched on with SWELS), SWU3 (basic customizing check — the first thing to run when nothing starts).

The developer's part

Raising the event at the right moment inside the application (or configuring change documents / status changes to raise it), implementing the methods the tasks call, and writing the rule that finds the approver. Everything else is a modeler's job in SWDD, and the boundary between the two is where most workflow projects go wrong.

What this page still needs

  • [ ] an ABAP class implementing IF_WORKFLOW with one event and one method, bound to a task
  • [ ] the event trace of one workflow start, recorded
  • [ ] flexible workflow beside the classic template, with what a developer still has to write

See also