Riptide Workflow Engine
Overview
The Riptide Workflow Engine is an enterprise-grade business process automation platform for multi-tenant environments. It provides declarative workflow orchestration, human task management, service integration, and comprehensive audit trails enabling organizations to automate complex business processes with complete tenant isolation, regulatory compliance, and operational visibility across their application portfolio.
Purpose
Traditional business process automation requires custom code for each workflow, creating maintenance burdens when processes evolve, regulations change, or organizations scale. The Riptide Workflow Engine solves this by:
- Providing declarative workflow definitions that business analysts can understand and maintain
- Supporting human task orchestration with assignments, escalations, and timeout management
- Enabling seamless integration with platform services and external systems
- Automating process execution with parallel flows, conditional routing, and error handling
- Maintaining complete audit trails for regulatory compliance and process analysis
- Delivering tenant-isolated workflows with independent configuration and governance
Key Capabilities
The Riptide Workflow Engine uses declarative JSON-based workflow definitions that describe processes as a series of steps with routing logic and service integrations. This approach allows business analysts to understand and maintain workflows without writing code, dramatically reducing the time and cost of implementing new processes or adapting existing ones.
Human task orchestration is central to the engine's design. It manages task assignments using configurable criteria such as user roles and round-robin distribution. Tasks can have timeouts that trigger escalations, ensuring work doesn't stall when team members are unavailable. The engine tracks task completion and automatically routes processes to the next step based on outcomes.
The platform provides native service orchestration with built-in integration points for Riptide Platform services including Fee Management, Document Generation, Notifications, and the Rules Engine. External system connectivity extends to enterprise systems like LDAP directories, ERP platforms, CRM systems, payment gateways, and legacy databases—enabling workflows to coordinate activities across your entire technology landscape.
Advanced workflow patterns include parallel processing that executes multiple branches simultaneously, conditional routing that makes decisions based on task data or business rules, and sophisticated error handling with retry logic and custom recovery actions. Every workflow execution is fully auditable, tracking each event, user action, and system decision to support regulatory compliance and process analysis.
Complete tenant isolation ensures that each application within your platform operates independently with its own workflow library, execution context, and configuration. Real-time performance monitoring provides visibility into execution times, completion rates, bottlenecks, and SLA compliance across all tenants.
Workflow Orchestration System
The Riptide Workflow Engine supports sophisticated process automation patterns that enable complex business logic. Service tasks automate interactions with platform services and external APIs, executing without human intervention. Human tasks coordinate user involvement, managing assignments, approvals, and data collection from user interactions at precisely the right moments in your process.
Decision and parallel gateways provide the control flow logic that makes workflows intelligent. Decision gateways route processes based on business logic or task outcomes, while parallel gateways enable concurrent execution of multiple branches—allowing independent activities to proceed simultaneously before synchronizing at a later point.
The engine handles time-based scenarios through timer events for schedule-based triggers and timeout handling. Error handlers catch and manage exceptions with custom recovery logic, while escalation rules automatically escalate tasks that exceed SLA thresholds, ensuring accountability and preventing work from stalling.
Integration Points
Applications interact with the Workflow Engine through a REST API that starts workflows, manages tasks, and queries instance status. Workflows reference platform services by logical name (such as platform.fee_calculator or platform.notification), with service endpoint configuration mapping these names to actual service URLs and authentication details in a tenant-aware manner.
The engine supports event-driven architecture when a message broker is available, publishing workflow events for downstream processing by other systems. Webhook callbacks notify external systems of workflow state changes and completion, enabling seamless integration with third-party platforms.
Built on the Riptide Platform SDK foundation, the Workflow Engine leverages common components for logging, configuration management, monitoring, and tenant isolation. An extensible connector framework allows applications to integrate with enterprise systems such as LDAP directories, payment gateways, document storage, and notification services. OpenTelemetry distributed tracing provides end-to-end visibility across workflow execution and all service calls.
Common Use Cases
Organizations use the Riptide Workflow Engine to automate a wide range of business processes. Document approval processes coordinate submission, validation, review, approval, and notification across multiple stakeholders. Application processing workflows handle intake, fee calculation, payment collection, assignment to reviewers, and decision routing—all without manual intervention until human judgment is required.
Compliance review workflows provide structured processes for regulatory verification with comprehensive audit trails that satisfy government and industry requirements. Renewal processing automates annual renewal cycles including fee calculations and approval workflows, reducing administrative burden while maintaining accuracy.
Service request management tracks requests from intake through fulfillment and closure, routing work to appropriate teams and providing visibility to all stakeholders. Multi-stage approval workflows handle complex approval chains with parallel reviews, conditional routing based on criteria like dollar amounts or risk levels, and automatic escalation when approvals stall.
The engine excels at human-system orchestration, blending automated service calls with human decision points to achieve optimal efficiency. Cross-functional processes coordinate activities across departments, systems, and external partners—breaking down silos and ensuring everyone works from the same process definition.
Technical Specifications
- Platform: .NET 8.0 with ASP.NET Core
- Data Storage: Entity Framework Core with configurable database providers (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc.) and row-level security for tenant isolation
- State Management: Persistent workflow state with atomic transitions and optimistic locking
- Authentication: OAuth2/JWT via Riptide Platform Identity with role-based access control
- Deployment: Docker containers with Kubernetes orchestration and horizontal auto-scaling
- API Documentation: OpenAPI/Swagger with RFC 7807 error responses
- Monitoring: OpenTelemetry distributed tracing, metrics collection, and alerting integration
- Performance: Stateless engine design designed for horizontal scaling
- High Availability: Supports multi-region deployment configurations
Roadmap
The Riptide Workflow Engine roadmap includes advanced capabilities planned for future releases:
Enhanced Task Assignment
- Advanced workload balancing algorithms based on current task loads and user capacity
- Skill-based routing for specialized task assignments
- Priority-based task queuing and SLA-aware assignment
Business Calendar Integration
- Tenant-specific business day rules and holiday calendars
- Deadline calculations respecting organizational and regulatory calendars
- Multi-jurisdiction calendar support for compliance-critical workflows
Compensation & Saga Patterns
- Automated compensation logic for distributed transaction rollback
- Saga pattern support for long-running business transactions
- Sophisticated error recovery with compensating actions
GraphQL API
- GraphQL endpoint for flexible workflow and task queries
- Real-time subscriptions for workflow events and state changes
- Optimized data fetching for complex workflow hierarchies
Advanced Scalability
- Database sharding by tenant for extreme scale requirements
- Multi-region active-active deployment with conflict resolution
- Enhanced caching strategies for high-frequency workflow patterns
Pre-Built Connectors
- LDAP/Active Directory integration for user authentication and directory services
- Payment gateway connectors for major providers
- Document storage connectors for enterprise document management systems
- Email and SMS notification service integrations
Why Riptide Workflow Engine
The Riptide Workflow Engine delivers regulatory compliance through comprehensive audit trails with configurable retention policies that meet the requirements of government and regulated industries. Every workflow event, decision, and user action is tracked and tamper-evident, providing the evidence needed for audits and legal proceedings.
Operational efficiency improves dramatically when repetitive processes are automated and manual handoffs are eliminated. The engine provides process visibility through real-time dashboards that show workflow status, identify bottlenecks, and track performance metrics—giving managers the insight they need to continuously improve operations.
Business agility increases because new processes can be deployed without writing custom code. Modify a workflow definition, test it, and go live—often in days rather than months. Complete tenant isolation ensures that workflows, tasks, and data remain separated across applications in multi-tenant platforms, meeting the strictest security and compliance requirements.
The platform is integration-ready with native platform service connections and an extensible connector framework that accelerates time-to-value. Scalability is built into the architecture through stateless engine design and horizontal auto-scaling that handles high-volume process execution without performance degradation.
User productivity increases with modern task interfaces, mobile support, and intelligent notifications. Organizations achieve cost reduction by eliminating custom workflow code and reducing the maintenance burden across applications. Quality assurance improves because standardized process execution reduces errors and ensures consistency across all instances of a workflow.