Basic Workflow Concepts

Every business can be said to be nothing more than a collection of processes, or workflows. Workflows consist of series of steps that when completed accomplish a business goal, such as approval of an expense report, hiring a new employee, or signing a contract. Workflows can be simple and linear processes, consisting of just a few steps, or can be complex, with decision points and exception handling, and are often depicted as flow charts.

 

In general, a workflow can be thought of as having the following components:

 

• An event or trigger starts an instance of a workflow. Such a trigger might be the submission of a form (such as an expense account), a timer, or some other event. Such triggers can be either event-driven or polled (that is, code runs in a loop looking for state changes). A particular kind of trigger, called Recurrence in Logic Apps, starts a Logic App on a scheduled basis.
• A task or action performs some processing, such as writing information to a database,