ftw.lawgiver-1.4.0-1.lbn19.noarch

Motivation

Developing and maintaining complex Plone workflows is a time-consuming and cumbersome endeavor. Dozens of permissions need to be managed for different roles and different workflow states. Usually, this has to be done directly in the ZMI of Zope by selecting or unselecting thousands of checkboxes. This process has been shown to be very tedious and prone to errors. Furthermore, it is no simple task to document the workflow and the associated design decisions which led to the resulting configuration of permissions and roles. The extension or adaption of an existing workflow becomes very difficult, leading to workflows which are barely maintainable.

Another problem poses the communication between workflow integrator and customer. The security system of Zope is based on a role-based access control (RBAC) which is intrinsically complex due to its use of roles, permissions, and workflow states. Experience has shown that these security concepts can be hard to convey to customers. How it works

ftw.lawgiver helps solving these problems by using a DSL to describe how a workflow should work. The lawgiver then generates the complete workflow definition (definition.xml) based on this specification. By separating this specification from the resulting workflow definition (which is in XML) the specification does not have to use permissions--handling the permissions is the job of the lawgiver.

Using the specification file the workflow can easily be regenerated at any time and will handle additional permissions automatically when regenerated. However, it is still the task of the developer to regenerate the definition.xml when more or other permissions have to be managed. He or she have to make sure that the workflow is properly installed with an upgrade step / reindexing security.