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TomHEMC
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Can I create a workflow that when run, creates a new workflow?

I would like to build a workflow that creates a new workflow.

We have a need for a workflow to prompt the user for a large number of values of different types - strings, securestrings, REST:RESTHost, etc.). We would then save these values in Config Element attributes. The list of values that we need to prompt for can change over time and I don't want to have to manually hand-code the inputs and types in the workflow designer.

Ideally, I would like to have a workflow that we could run during development that would iterate over the set of Config Elements and their attributes, determine their name, type, and description, and create a new workflow that would have all those attributes as inputs, of the proper type, hooked up to a task that writes them into their respective attributes. Hope that makes sense. I can do the iteration over the config elements and the writing of values back in - I just can't figure out how to create a workflow programatically.

I see that there is a workflow under HTTP-REST called Generate a new workflow from a REST operation. I ran this and it indeed created a new workflow with an input and a scriptable task with code to make the REST call. Very cool but all of that magic is hidden behind the REST plug-in (I think) and I can't really figure out how it does it.

I also thought about writing some sort of text file representation of a workflow but didn't get very far on that. I know there is Maven that is used for version control of packages but I'm not totally clear on whether that would be a good route to take - and I'd rather avoid extra tools if possible.

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks.

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iiliev
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Currently, there is no public scripting API to create workflows.

Few vRO plug-ins (HTTP-REST, DynamicTypes, etc.) are able to create new workflows using Java API, but this API is internal and not available in the public SDK.

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iiliev
VMware Employee
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Currently, there is no public scripting API to create workflows.

Few vRO plug-ins (HTTP-REST, DynamicTypes, etc.) are able to create new workflows using Java API, but this API is internal and not available in the public SDK.

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TomHEMC
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Thanks for the reply.

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