How to do the inspection the state of the workflow for business reporting?

[lezhnev74]

I am thinking that workflow is a great tool to encapsulate a long running process. I see that Waterline allows for techniocal monitoring, like who has failed and has running. I am looking for a way to embed workflows into business processes, like watching where this workflow is at right now (maybe inspecting the state).

Is there any APIs in this direction or clues where I should be looking at?

Thank you!

[rmcdaniel]

This is a great question.

Workflow state is technical state (running, completed, failed, etc). It exists to answer questions like “did the orchestration execute successfully?”, not “what was the business outcome?”.

Because of that, you should not rely on workflow status to determine business meaning. Instead, capture business state explicitly as part of the workflow execution (e.g. updating domain/read models at meaningful milestones), and expose that state via queries designed for reporting.

https://laravel-workflow.com/docs/features/queries

[durable-workflow-ops]

A good rule of thumb is to separate technical workflow state from business reporting state.

Use queries when you want a live workflow snapshot, such as the current step, whether approval has arrived, or which identifiers have already been recorded.

For reporting, update your own tables or projections at meaningful workflow milestones and build dashboards from those read models instead of from workflow runtime state.

I also opened a docs clarification PR with this guidance here: durable-workflow/durable-workflow.github.io#9