Best Practice: Workflow vs Module development?

Permanently deleted user

19. August 2011 16:20

When should you switch from using a workflow to developing a code module? Does anyone have a suggestion on what is good practice (assuming you have a developer that is capable of authoring both)?

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  Permanently deleted user

  16. September 2011 23:25

  Hi Stephen,

  Like all "best practices", the situation will determine what your best choice is.

  Both workflows and viewer modules are intended to be generic and reusable.  Generally, I would switch from workflow to a module when the UI limits of workflow are hit (say, you need to select a region of a picture as an input).

  Workflow doesn't really have a processing limit, as you can create custom activities and reference them from your workflow.  So, you can do "anything" on the server side, presuming you have the development time and processing time.

  I would also consider a viewer module if the workflow required a lot of round-trips to the server.  If we could reduce those trips by performing some work within the viewer itself, that's a big plus.  Same argument for scaling up a viewer.  If a task is particularly CPU intensive, it might make more sense to "distribute" it to the clients rather than bottlenecking the server.  For example, say your complex task takes 5 seconds to run.  That's fine for a handful of users, but if you have 1000 clients, it's better to make each client wait 5 seconds for their computer to churn through, than wait hours for their spot in the queue to come up.

  Hope this helps!  Remember, these are guidelines and not rules and your own investigations may prove otherwise.

  Regards,

  -Malcolm

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