My Experiments with SAP Cloud Platform Workflow, FaaS and Twillio - Part 1 Troubleshooting Forms

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What we are trying to make?

Last few weeks have been quite happening courtesy SAP TechEd's. There is too much to learn and experiment. So we started our experiments with Function as a Service, as it is now available in trial version as beta feature.

Through this series of blog plan is to come up with SAP Cloud Platform Workflow utility using Function as a service. We will have the basic tool ready which can be enhanced as per the need. If you look at current SAP Cloud Workflow service, we believe we can add lot of features from workflow administration point of view till the service gets mature.  So we will be making a basic workflow administration utility using Workflow, function as a service and Twilio.We will begin by making a simple workflow with one user task which uses a form. Very simple isn't it, read on a simple task like this can also become time consuming sometimes.



 

Starting with the first piece - Simple Workflow with Forms.

We have been looking to use forms since the day they were available. We have designed a simple form with one amount field which will be shown to the user as shown below. Once everything was ready we deployed the workflow to the cloud. Thought wow it's so easy, but proven wrong again. The real trouble came when we started testing read on!





 

Trouble 1- Workflow triggered but not in my inbox?

We have done everything right workflow is also starting, but why the work item is not coming in my inbox? We have some existing workflows working well, took a closer look and found the userid was maintained without CAPS as compared in current workflow. Fixed and finally we have the work item in inbox.

Trouble 2 - Workitem in my inbox but form not loading?

Although we can see the workitem but on clicking it, the form was not loading. Where to look now was something which we were wondering, The workflow log looks fine.  We thought lets switch on the browser debugger as always to check why it is not loading, must be some call failing .

Bingo the moment we switched on the debugger the reason was immediately known. We have completely missed to deploy the form to cloud platform. It is not able to find it. We have only deployed the workflow. So we right clicked on the form and deployed it. We were hoping it will work but sadly it failed again with new reason this time.

Trouble 3 - Form deployed still not loading?

The form was still not loading even after deploying the form to the cloud platform. Good thing is our browser development console was on. Immediately we found the reason there was data type mismatch between the form field and context data type as can be seen below.

Finally everything is up and running?

On fixing the data type, we were up and running. So finally we have one very basic workflow with forms up and running.

What is next?

In the next blog we will be doing experiments with the SAP Cloud Platform Function as a service to build on our initial concept of Workflow Administration using Function as a Service. Feel free to provide you feedback.