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Workflow Persistence Boundaries

Summary​

One EF Core DbContext owns Workflow definitions, versions, steps, conditions, instances, tasks, actions, audit, timeline, processed-event and outbox records.

Aggregate mappings​

Definitions cascade to versions, steps and conditions. Instances cascade to tasks and actions. Enum values are stored as strings; context, audit details, timeline metadata and outbox payload use structured JSON columns.

Constraints and indexes​

Persistence enforces tenant/key uniqueness and definition/version uniqueness. Indexes support stage ordering, instance status/key lookup, user/role worklists, action lookup, chronological feeds, processed-event uniqueness and outbox processing.

Save boundary​

Commands stage aggregate changes, audit and timeline records before calling one unit of work. SaveChangesAsync maps queued aggregate events to outbox messages before EF Core commits, then clears the domain-event queues.

Outbox boundary​

The store selects pending or failed records in chronological batches. The shared processor marks messages processed or failed using subsequent saves.

Limitations​

No explicit transaction orchestration beyond one DbContext save, concurrency tokens, archival/retention worker or processed-event consumer is implemented in this service.

Requires Confirmation​

Retention, database transaction retry, outbox cleanup and production migration ownership require confirmation.

Source References​

  • microservices/src/workflow-service/Infrastructure/WorkflowDbContext.cs
  • microservices/src/workflow-service/Infrastructure/Persistence.cs
  • microservices/src/workflow-service/Domain/Workflow/WorkflowDomainEvents.cs
  • microservices/src/workflow-service/Messaging/WorkflowIntegrationEvents.cs

See Also​

Keywords​

Workflow architecture, approval engine, Workflow Service, technical foundation.

Revision Information​

  • Status: Draft
  • Last reviewed: 2026-07-20
  • Next review: 2026-10-20