YAWL User Group

This tutorial is written for YAWL 4.x and replaces a previous tutorial for YAWL 2.3.

In addition to using net variables in YAWL we can also store and fetch data directly from a database. In this tutorial we show how to retrieve data from a simple database table using a YAWL Data Gateway. In the previous tutorial for YAWL 2.3 Microsoft database was used. Here we will demonstrate the case with PostgreSQL. We assume that you are familiar with the basics of databases and have installed PostgreSQL and pgAdmin.

We start by creating a new database with name "CustomerDB" and owner "postgres" having password "postgres". In this database we create a table "Customers" with owner "postgres". We create columns ID:integer (primary key), Name:text, Age:integer and fill it with some data:

When we click on the magnifying glass symbol in pgAdmin while table "Customers" is selected we get the SQLeditor. There we choose the tab "Graphical Query Builder", navigate to table "Customers", select "Name" and "Age", and click on the green triangle. We should get the following query:

SELECT
  "Customers"."Name",
  "Customers"."Age"
FROM
  public."Customers";

Now we create a new Java project named "yawlDataGateway" in Eclipse or Netbeans. We download the YAWL Library Jars, unzip them and add the yawl-lib-4.2.jar and YResourceServiceClient.jar to the build path. Furthermore, you need jdom-2.0.6.jar and hibernate-core-4.3.11.Final.jar in the build path.

The code of the class MyExternalDBGatewayImpl is attached here. We deploy yawlDataGateway.jar to ../webapps/yawl/WEB-INF/lib. We restart the YAWL engine and the editor.

We build a simple YAWL workflow as attached here. If everything works correctly, it should look like this:

The Java code is a quick hack - not very robust. Who has a more elegant solution?