Subscription and Workflow
Applies To: System Center 2012 - Service Manager
[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]
Service Manager provides the ability to process items by using workflows. Workflows have custom activity steps that items pass through. In each step, some kind of action can be taken. Workflows are triggered based on the subscription model that they are configured to use. Each workflow is configured in Service Manager to have a set of parameters passed to it from the target object of the workflow. For example, if you are working with an Active Directory user, you can send the full name and street address properties of that user to the workflow as parameters.
You can use subscriptions and workflows to track an item and respond to it. When a subscription targets an item, that subscription is triggered when something occurs to that item. The subscription and workflow combination is referred to as a rule.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions represent the data source for the workflow. Instance subscriptions are triggered when an enterprise management object (EMO) is created, deleted, or updated. For example, if an instance subscription was created for the System.WorkItem.Library!System.WorkItem class, and configured to use a created trigger, then the workflow would be executed whenever an instance of System.WorkItem.Library!System.WorkItem was created. Any of these three triggers can have criteria applied to them. You can use criteria to filter out unwanted objects. For example, only an object that has a specific property value would be sent to the workflow, whereas all other objects that did not meet the criteria would be ignored.
You can also target a relationship object, but this only works with the created or updated triggers. However, you do not work with the relationship object directly; instead, you work with the source or target of that relationship. For more information about how to configure and use subscriptions, see Workflow Overview.
Workflows
Workflows are always created by using Windows Workflow Foundation. These assemblies are referenced in the management pack and can have parameters passed to them. The parameters come from the object instance used in the subscription part of the rule. The workflow configuration in the rule identifies which properties from the object instance to pass to the workflow, and which properties in the workflow to store them in. For more information about how to configure and use workflows, see Workflow Overview.
See Also
Concepts
Management Pack
Model
Instance Manipulation
Workflow Overview