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Building Blocks

Cohesive.Processes

Cohesive Processes icon

Cohesive.Processes is the workflow semantics layer for coordinating reads, transitions, effects, decisions, waits, signals, and outputs over time.

Processes describe intent and coordination separately from the runtime that executes them. The same process model can be interpreted by local test harnesses, durable workflow engines, API endpoints, hosted workers, or future infrastructure adapters.

Workflow Semantics

Many workflows are hidden in service methods, queue handlers, cron jobs, controller branches, and integration callbacks. Cohesive.Processes makes the coordination model explicit.

A process can describe a sequence or graph of work: read entity state, query related facts, invoke a transition, emit an effect, wait for a signal, branch on a predicate, start another process, or return a shaped result.

Process Model

The process IR can represent:

  • Inputs and outputs shaped by Cohesive.Core.
  • Entity references and transition invocations.
  • Query and relation reads.
  • Effects and external intents.
  • Wait points, correlation keys, timers, and signals.
  • Decision nodes based on expressions or typed authoring delegates.
  • Execution metadata for tracing, replay, and diagnostics.

Determinism And Waits

Durable work needs more than a function call. Cohesive.Processes separates semantic decisions from runtime effects so execution can be replayed, resumed, inspected, and tested.

Waits are modeled as process semantics instead of incidental infrastructure callbacks. That makes approval flows, integration handshakes, long-running training jobs, settlement workflows, and human-in-the-loop tasks easier to reason about.

Integration

Processes sit across the rest of the stack:

  • Cohesive.Entities supplies legal transitions and effects.
  • Cohesive.Relations supplies queries and projections.
  • Cohesive.Storage supplies repository state and streams.
  • Cohesive.Api exposes process start, status, signal, and query operations.
  • Cohesive.Identity preserves actor, initiator, scope, and capability context.
  • Cohesive.Presentation can surface process actions, status, tasks, and timelines.

Why It Matters

Processes are where system meaning becomes temporal. They make long-running behavior visible as a model that can be generated, tested, traced, resumed, and projected into operations tooling.