Form Management in the Vicomte Workflow System

It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of workflow management systems to integrate automated processes with human processes in an application system. The way a human process is modelled in a workflow system is by capturing the significant events of the process. These events include notifying the user who is assigned to perform the process, disseminating information that is necessary for the user to carry out the process, and collecting information that is generated as the result of the user process. Such events are often presented to the user or captured from the user using forms. This paper presents a form management system that is part of the Vicomte workflow management system. The major components include a form specification language, a facility for dynamically generating HTML pages with client-side validation to be used over the internet, as well as processing modules for the generated HTML pages on the server side. The architecture of the form management system is rather general and therefore is applicable for many systems requiring an effective form processing