What are some best practices for basic workflow using biztalk 2009?

Question

I'm working on a Biztalk 2009 proof of concept project and would like to setup a basic approval workflow.

Request Vacation.

Step 1. Request Vacation.
Step 2. Route Request to Manager.
Step 3. Manager Approve / Denies Vacation.
Step 4. Update Vacation Calender / Notify Originator of Approval.

Outside of Biztalk I'll have to provide an interface for requesting vacation and approving vacation.

How do I get the list of items pending approval for my manager? I'm confused about if the list of pending items should be maintained / queried from Biztalk, or if I need to build a separate set of tables to manage what is awaiting approval.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

At it's core, BizTalk is a messaging bus (okay, not really, but it's a useful abstraction). It doesn't actually store data on its own. In point of fact, I'm not sure based just on this scenario that BizTalk is your best bet. If you have SharePoint, using normal WorkFlows through SharePoint might work better for you.

That said, if the BizTalk decision has been made, I'd do the following:

Interface for requesting / approving
The Approval interface would hook into a data store (probably a SQL DB) to get a list of the "waiting approval" items.
Once the status of the item is set to "Approved" or "Denied" have SQL push data to BizTalk to kick off the rest of the process.

To your specific quesiton: yes, you'll need some place outside of BizTalk to store the requests, and the list of "pending" requests would be better generated from that store.