Manipulating Workflow Process Properties

There’s every chance you’ve never heard of the business service Workflow Process Utilities method Echo. It’s under-documented, under-used and under-rated. I’d built a whole bunch of complex workflow processes before I came across it, now I ‘Echo’ stuff all over the place.

All the method does is reflect back the input arguments. Big deal, eh? The thing is, the input arguments can be expressions or business component fields or property set values or functions or anything you can usually reference from a workflow. So you can manipulate process properties without taking any other action, or you can get a current business component field value without doing a query, or you can get at property set child elements using dot notation – all things that I’d struggled to do previously without scripting.

Plenty of good examples on SupportWeb under a search of ‘Workflow AND Echo’. Note that in early versions of Siebel 7 the display name of the method is ‘Return Property Values’, plus there’s a fixable bug in 7.0.