RE: [bpel4people] ISSUE 6: Title: Does ht:getLogicalPeopleGroup() cause an LPG to evaluate?

["Martin Chapman" <martin.chapman@oracle.com>]

Mark,

A function that behaves differently depending on context, as suggested in the last paragraph, is always a bad idea in my opinion.
I'd rather see two different functions, or a parameter requesting evaluation or not.

Martin.


>-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Ford [mailto:mark.ford@activevos.com] 
>Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 8:54 PM
>To: bpel4people@lists.oasis-open.org; 'Trickovic, Ivana'
>Subject: [bpel4people] ISSUE 6: Title: Does 
>ht:getLogicalPeopleGroup() cause an LPG to evaluate?
>
>
>The discussion at today's conference call clarified that the 
>original intent for this custom function was to provide a 
>means for getting a value from an LPG without triggering an 
>evaluation of the LPG. The assumption is that the LPG would 
>have been previously evaluated and the process or task 
>definition wants to reference the same value from that LPG to 
>ensure that it doesn't change with another evaluation. 
>
>I don't see the use case for this implementation. If a user 
>wants to ensure that they're getting the exact same values 
>from an LPG then they can use a local variable to store those 
>values and read from that variable. If the function is going 
>to be used within a task definition then the caller would more 
>likely want to pull organizational entities from one of the 
>task's generic human roles as opposed to pulling directly from 
>the LPG. The same would apply if someone were building a four 
>eyes pattern with people activities. It's better to use the 
>b4p functions to pull the values from the generic human roles 
>rather than to try and reuse a value from an LPG. 
>
>The simpler approach is to have one way of accessing LPG data. 
>Each call into an LPG triggers an evaluation of the LPG. The 
>only exception is if the LPG was previously assigned. With 
>this model, an LPG has two states: unassigned and assigned. 
>LPG's are in the assigned state when they are the target of a 
>copy operation. In this state they always returns the same 
>value. An LPG in the unassigned state always evaluates. In 
>this approach, there is no difference between the custom function
>ht:getLogicalPeopleGroup() and the ht:from or bpel:from.
>
>
>
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