Visual Editor for Workflow Rules In Salesforce

Abstract: Nowadays interactive systems cannot be developed isolated from workflows and the application domains they are embedded in. Unfortunately, a conceptual gap between design representations for interactive systems and workflow specifications exists. This gap leads to the situation that it can be checked in a very late stage of development whether an interactive system actually fits into a particular workflow or not. If not, redesign is required and the development costs may be increased dramatically. In order to avoid this worst case, in this paper we introduce a framework and environment that allows the refinement of workflows to system functions at an implementation- independent layer. At the heart of this new approach lies a single page interaction model that facilitates rich interactivity. This paper describes how such a visual editor can prove to be useful for quicker generation, and understanding of complex workflows. This paper also gives the various Javascript libraries that would prove useful in developing a better User Interface. A simple design for visual editor is presented in order to demonstrate our approach. Our prototype implementation is discussed at the end of the paper.

Keywords: Salesforce, Apex, Visualforce, Visual Editor, workflow, WSDL ,Metadata API.