The Workflow GUI is implemented as an Eclipse perspective, consisting of an editor area (for editing the tgwf workflow document or input/result objects) and the following views:
Workflow preparation: here you can select a tgwf Workflow document, display input TexGridObjects, choose the target project where resulting objects are to be created, and initiate the execution of the workflow
Job Management: query for the status of the user's wokflow jobs at the engine
Result viewer: display the list of resulting TextGridObjects created anew
The following figure 4 shows the interface; more details on how to use the GUI will be explained below.
figure 4: The workflow perspective
The workflow perspective can be opened in different ways:
By clicking on the “Workflow” link/icon on the welcome screen
By selecting “Workflow” from the “Tools” menu
B clicking the
icon in the icon tray
or, by right-clicking on one or more TextGridObjects in either the Research Results or the Navigator, and choosing “Add to Workflow” (see figure 5 below)
figure 5: Adding input documents to a workflow
The first three options will be more useful if a user wants to query the status of her workflows, or if she just wants to jump to this perspective, or reset it. If on the other hand the user wants to execute an existing workflow with some input objects, the fourth option should be chosen.
This is the left-hand side view of the workflow perspective. It contains:
A list of all available workflow. If the user is not logged in, only published workflows will appear here. In order to see your own ones, press the “Refresh list” button after logging in. Do this also if you just created a new workflow. It is possible to view, and, depending on your rights, edit the workflows by right-clicking in this list and choosing an appropriate editor.
The selection of the target project into which the newly created TextGridObjects (the result of processing your input TextGridObjects) are to be saved. You must be logged in for the TextGridLab to know your status (e.g. Bearbeiter) on any project.
A list of the input documents scheduled for your workflow. Add new documents to the list by right-clicking on one or more TextGridObjects in either the Research Results or the Navigator, and choosing “Add to Workflow”. Remove them from the list by selecting one or more entries and clicking the “Remove selected input(s)” button. It is possible to view, and, depending on your rights, edit the input documents by right-clicking in this list and choosing an appropriate editor.
And finally, the button “Run with input document”, which will execute the workflow selected in the upper list, with the input documents from the lower list. The resulting documents will be stored in the project specified as the target project.
Once the workflow is started by the “Run...” button, it will be submitted to the GWES workflow engine and started there. It will be added to the Job Management view as “active”.
All jobs owned by the current user will be displayed in this list. If you expect to see some jobs here, check to see if you are not logged in yet. Every job is listed by its name, its time of submission, and its status. The status of the job can be one of:
initiated – the workflow has just been submitted but not started yet
running – state when the workflow has been started
active – if there are active transitions working
suspended – if a user (perhaps via the monitoring tool) paused the workflow
completed – if the workflow ended successful
terminated – if there was an error during execution
There are two buttons below the list: The “Refresh job list” button queries for the current status of the user's workflows at the workflow engine. The “See results” button has two meanings:
either, if the status of the selected job is completed, it will display the result documents of this job in the Workflow Results window.
or, if the status of the selected job is terminated, it will show an error message to the user and write the engine's error or warning output into the TextGridLab's error log file.
This list is for the user's convenience. Instead of having to locate the resulting documents in the Navigator, or searching for them, all resulting TextGridObjects created as the output of the respective Workflow will be displayed here. It is possible to view, and edit these documents by right-clicking in this list and choosing an appropriate editor. Currently the user still has to select the workflow in the Job Management view and click “See results” first before they are displayed.
A new TextGrid workflow is created similarly to any other TextGridObject: Choose “New Object...” from the File menu, then pick the project to save this workflow in, and select “TextGrid Workflow Document” as type of the new object. The next step is to enter the metadata of the workflow, which is not different compared to other TextGridObjects – however, it is better to accept the pre-set type “workflow” here in order to search more easily later on.
After clicking on “Finish”, the TextGrid XML Editor will be opened with a template of an incomplete workflow. Use either the “Design” or the “Source” view. The editor knows the tgwf schema behind the workflow and will assist you with typing in. You may want to adapt contents of already existing workflows to your needs. If you are unsure about editing the tgwf XML or the XSL stylesheet contained therein (the rules for creating the new metadata of the resulting objects), please feel free to ask for support from the TextGrid community.