Workflows

Most integrations start simple and end up long-lived: an order needs a manager's approval, a claim waits days for supporting documents, a payment needs a retry after a gateway hiccup. A normal program loses everything when the process restarts — a durable workflow does not.

A workflow is a step-by-step process that completes a larger task. WSO2 Integrator lets you design workflows that:

• Survive crashes and restarts — every completed step is recorded, and the workflow resumes exactly where it left off. A finished step is never re-executed.
• Wait for as long as it takes — pause for hours, days, or months for a human decision or an external event, consuming no threads or connections while suspended.
• Recover from failures — retry failed steps automatically, or hand the failure to a human who can fix the input and retry.
• Keep humans in the loop — assign role-based tasks that people decide from the Human Tasks page of the Integration Control Plane.

Two ways to build, one durable runtime

Durable Workflow	Durable Agentic Workflow
You wire the steps together in a visual flow	You describe the goal in natural language; an AI model decides the steps
Explicit, predictable path	Adapts to each request at runtime
Best for known, fixed business logic	Best for branchy, hard-to-enumerate logic

Both run on the same durable runtime, so an AI agent gets crash safety, human tasks, timers, and retries for free.

Getting started

• Build an Order Processing Workflow: Your first durable workflow — it reserves inventory, waits for a payment confirmation, and then confirms or cancels the order.
• Build a Claim Handling Durable Agent: A durable agentic workflow — an agent that validates expense claims and pays them out only after a Finance reviewer approves.

Develop workflows

• Create a workflow: Add the artifact, give it an input type, and design its steps on the diagram.
• Start a workflow: Launch a run from a service or an automation, and keep the ID that identifies it.
• Activities: The recorded units of work in a workflow — exactly-once on replay and retryable on failure.
• Durable timers: Pause for hours, days, or months with a wait that survives restarts and holds no threads or connections.
• Await data events: Wait until an external system or a person delivers the data the workflow needs, then resume with it.
• Send a data event: Deliver a value into a waiting run, using the workflow ID it was started with.
• Await human task: Pause for role-based human decisions and external data, for as long as it takes.
• Error handling and review activities: Approval gates before risky steps and human-reviewed retries after failures.
• Prebuilt activities: Durable REST, SOAP, and email calls with no wrapper to write.

Develop agentic workflows

• Create a durable agent: Describe the goal in natural language, and give the agent activities, data events, and human tasks as its capabilities.
• Run a durable agent: Start an agent instance from an integration flow, and bind the instance ID the rest of the flow needs.
• Send an agent data event: Deliver one turn on a channel the running agent listens on, and keep the correlation token it returns.
• Get a data event result: Read the agent's answer to a sent turn, using that correlation token.
• Get an agent result: Read what an agent instance finally produced, addressed by its instance ID.

Manage running workflows

• Manage workflows: Register an integration so its workflows, tasks, and reviews appear in the console, and find your way around the workflow views.
• Start a workflow: Launch an execution from a form generated out of the workflow's input type.
• Workflow executions: Follow a run through its timeline, execution graph, and history, and suspend, resume, or terminate it.
• Complete human tasks: Complete the tasks a run is waiting on, and approve, correct, or reject a gated or failed activity.
• Workflow permissions: The permissions behind each workflow view, and the roles that decide whose tasks are whose.

Reference

• Management API: The REST API behind the Control Plane — list instances, read execution graphs, and complete tasks programmatically.
• Deployment modes: Choose the workflow engine a run records to, and configure its connection, authentication, and worker settings.