Mobile Workflow Package Overview

The basic components of a Mobile Workflow package include starting points, screens and navigations, controls and keys, and menu items.

Starting points

There are four kinds of starting points:

Client-initiated – initiated manually by the user when he or she opesn a Mobile Workflow form from the Workflow menu on the device.
Server-initiated – initiated when the user opens an e-mail message on the device in which the field contents of the message meet the conditions specified in the Mobile Workflow packages' matching rules.
Credential Request – sent by the server when it needs authentication information for Unwired Platform.
Activate – initiated when the Workflow package is used for the first time on the user’s device.

Screens and navigations

Navigations represent transitions from a starting point to a screen, or from one screen to another.

New screens are opened when the user clicks a menu item or a row in a Listview control. Screens can also be opened upon success or failure of an operation.

Screens series are designed from a starting point. Screens appear one at a time on the device. Screens are opened on a stack, and closed in the reverse order in which they were added. Each screen contains one or more controls.

Controls and keys

There are seven types of controls—Checkbox, Editbox, Choice, Slider, Signature, Htmlview and Listview.

Htmlview and Listview controls, if present on a screen, must be the only control on that screen.

Editbox controls have a logical type—Text, Numeric, Date, DateTime, or Time. Depending on the logical type, the control at runtime may behave differently, for example, for Date, a datepicker control is available.

The contents of controls are bound to keys. When the screen is opened, the key value determines what appears in the control. When the control’s contents are updated, key value changes accordingly.

For server-initiated starting points, you can specify where the value associated with a given key comes from, for example, as an MBO attribute.

When a menu item is bound to an MBO operation or object query, each parameter of the operation or object query is bound to a key. When the operation or object query is invoked, the value passed into each parameter is the value associated with the corresponding key.

Menu items

There are seven types of menu items:

Save – closes the current screen, validates the current input and, if validation succeeds, saves it.
Cancel – discards any changes on the current screen and closes it. No validation occurs.
Close – discards any changes on any open screens and closes all open screens. No validation occurs.
Open – opens a different screen.
Add – opens a different screen, where you can add a new row to a listview.
Submit – validates the entered data on open screens and sends it to the server. There, the server invokes the specified MBO operation or object query. If the Submit menu item has an asynchronous communication style, the client application closes once the request is sent. If the Submit menu item has a synchronous communication style, the client application stays open.
Add/Update/Delete Listview Row – specifies the MBO operation that is associated with the appropriate action on the Listview. These operations are not invoked immediately, but are instead invoked when a Submit operation is made on the parent MBO to which this MBO is related. It can be added only to screens that are navigated to as the result of a Listview details navigation, for example, by clicking a row in a Listview.