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## Roles

Oracle Workflow roles are stored in the database, in the Oracle Workflow directory service. Currently, new workflow roles cannot be created in Oracle Workflow Builder, but Oracle Workflow Builder can display and reference the roles stored in a database.

#### Referencing Roles in a Workflow Process

One example of how roles are referenced in a workflow process is when you include a notification activity in a process as a node. You must assign that node to a performer. The performer can be a designated role or an item type attribute that dynamically returns a role. To assign a performer to a role, you must initially load the roles from your Oracle Workflow database into your Oracle Workflow Builder session. See: Setting Up an Oracle Workflow Directory Service and To Define Nodes in a Process.

> Note: Referencing roles in a workflow process is currently supported in Oracle Workflow Builder, although the Roles tab page seen in the property pages of certain workflow objects will not be supported until a future release. The purpose of the Roles tab page is to give a role access to a certain object.

#### Ad Hoc Users and Roles

Oracle Workflow allows you to create new ad hoc users and roles within a workflow process, to add to your directory service. To do so, you define a function activity that makes a server-side call to the appropriate WF_DIRECTORY API and include that function activity in your process diagram. See: Standard API for PL/SQL Procedures Called by Function Activities and Workflow Directory Service APIs.

### See Also

To Load Roles

To Display the Directory Service in Oracle Workflow Builder

#### To Load Roles

1. If you are not connected to an Oracle Workflow database, choose Open from the File menu to connect to the database and open your item type.

2. Choose from the File menu, Load Roles from Database. A Role Selection window appears. You can enter search criteria using SQL query syntax in the Find Roles field to find a subset of roles, or just choose Find without specifying any search criteria to identify all roles. The Role Selection window finds the roles you specify and displays them in the Query Results list box.

3. Select the roles you want to load from the Query Results list and choose Add to add them to the Loaded Roles list. Alternatively, just choose Add All to add all the roles in the Query Results list to the Loaded Roles list. Choose OK to load the selected roles into Oracle Workflow Builder and make them available to the workflow objects in your open item type.

The workflow objects that need to reference role information contain specific fields in their property pages. These fields are poplist fields that display the list of roles you loaded from the database, as shown in the following Node property page example.

4. When you select a role from one of these poplist fields, you can also choose the Edit button to the right of the field to display the property sheet of the selected role.

5. The Role property page that appears lists read-only information about that role.

> Note: When you reopen a saved process definition in Oracle Workflow Builder, any role information that the process references automatically gets loaded even if you open the process definition from a file and are not connected to the database.

#### To Display the Directory Service in Oracle Workflow Builder

1. Once you load your roles from the database in Oracle Workflow Builder, you can display your directory service information in the navigator tree. See: To Load Roles.

2. Expand the Directory Service branch in the navigator tree. All the roles that you loaded from the database appear.

3. Double-click on a role to display read-only information about that role as shown below. Note that the Directory Service branch does not currently allow you to view the participant users of a role.

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