Overview of creating the workflows

When the BMC Atrium Orchestrator product executes a workflow, it receives information, manipulates that information, performs actions through other software or runs commands on other servers, gathers additional information, and presents the results. Information is passed in context items, while adapters direct the actions of the other software. When you create a workflow in the BMC Atrium Orchestrator Development Studio application, you identify the sources of the input information in the Start activity, define the ways the context items are used to pass and manipulate the information with assign statements, and instruct the adapters on how to direct the other software.

The examples in this set of topics create a set of workflows that work together to accomplish the objective of generating a directory listing and then running the copy command on each file in the directory. The tasks are grouped by workflow, and each task assumes that you have completed the preceding tasks. The main tasks include:

1. Creating the Directory list workflow
   The Directory list workflow lists the contents of a directory that you specify. This workflow will be used in the top-level workflow, Copy Files in Directory. Because this is the first workflow, its tasks are discussed in greater depth than for the other workflows.
2. Creating configuration items
   Configuration items are similar to constants. This task creates configuration items that are used in subsequent workflows.
3. Creating the connection details concept
   A concept is a context item containing multiple values. In this task, you create and test a concept that contains the information required to invoke the copy command. 
4. Creating the Copy File workflow
   The Copy File process copies a specified file to a target directory.
5. Creating the Copy Files in Directory workflow
   The top-level workflow, Copy Files in Directory, combines all the previous workflows to accomplish the objective.

The sample workflows were developed in a Windows environment. If you want to use them on other operating systems, you must modify them to conform to requirements of the other operating systems.