Configurable government service workflow

How io.example.gov_services turns one codebase into a service-delivery capability that every tenant, and every service inside a tenant, configures for itself — locally fulfilled, delegated with verification, or routed per request.

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1. The model

Fulfilment modes

• LOCAL — the receiving unit fulfils the request itself.
• DELEGATE — the request is forwarded to a lower unit while the upper unit monitors and verifies the result.
• HYBRID — a routing rule decides per request which of the two applies.

A service selects its mode and its published workflow version; no code changes are involved.

2. State machine

Task statuses:

RECEIVED → ASSIGNED → IN_PROGRESS ─┬─→ COMPLETED → CLOSED
                                   ├─→ AWAITING_VERIFICATION → COMPLETED
                                   │                        └→ RETURNED → …
                                   ├─→ FORWARDED (delegation; child task opens)
                                   ├─→ INFO_REQUESTED → IN_PROGRESS
                                   ├─→ REJECTED
                                   └─→ CANCELLED

Code decides what is possible; configuration decides what is offered. The canonical transition table lives in workflow.go and encodes the invariants — you cannot verify work that is not awaiting verification, you cannot act on a terminal task. A published version may narrow that set through gov_workflow_transitions; it can never widen it. This keeps the invariants unit-testable without a database and means a misconfigured tenant cannot reach an impossible state.

Rules that hold everywhere:

• The resulting status is computed server-side. A client sends an action, never a status.
• reject, return and request_info are refused without a comment.
• Completion lands in AWAITING_VERIFICATION when the step sets requires_verification, so a lower unit finishing work never closes the overall request. The parent stays FORWARDED until the child is verified.
• Overdue is derived (due_at < now() on a non-terminal status), never written over the business status.
• Every transition is one transaction: task update, timeline event, cascade to the parent, derived request status and outbox row all commit together.

Concurrency

gov_tasks.row_version is required on every action and guards the update. Two officers acting on the same task from the same read produce one winner and one CONFLICT_VERSION — never a lost update.

3. Tenant and organisational isolation

Isolation is enforced in the schema, not only in queries. Every table that references a unit, a workflow version or a request carries a composite foreign key including tenant_id, so a row cannot point across tenants even if application code has a bug:

CONSTRAINT gov_tasks_unit_fk FOREIGN KEY (unit_id, tenant_id)
    REFERENCES gov_org_units (id, tenant_id)

Within a tenant:

• A user's scope is the units in gov_unit_members; a SUPERVISOR also covers every descendant of its unit.
• Queue and dashboard queries apply that scope in SQL, so paging cannot walk past the boundary.
• A user with no unit assignment sees an empty queue, not the tenant.
• Tenant administrators are scoped to the whole tenant.
• verify and return are checked against the parent task's unit, because they are exercised by the level above.

4. Routing

Every strategy is an explicit branch. There is no expression evaluator, so tenant configuration can never make the platform evaluate arbitrary input. Rules are ordered by priority, and a service-scoped rule outranks a tenant-wide one at equal priority.

5. Upstream ingestion

POST /api/v1/gov/requests/ingest
{
  "source_system": "E-MONGOLIA",
  "external_request_id": "EM-2026-000123",
  "service_code": "PASSPORT",
  "applicant_name": "Бат Болд",
  "fields": { "region": "UB-NORTH" }
}

Idempotency contract

• Identity is (tenant_id, source_system, external_request_id), enforced by a unique index.
• An identical retry returns the existing request with "created": false and creates no second task and no second timeline entry.
• A replay carrying the same identity but a materially different payload is refused with 409 IDEMPOTENCY_CONFLICT. "Different" means a different SHA-256 over the canonical field set, stored as payload_fingerprint.

Authentication. The endpoint runs behind the platform's session/bearer middleware, the app gate and the gov.apply permission. Binding it to OAuth2 client credentials (so machine clients are distinguishable from staff) is the one deliberately deferred step — see §8.

6. Status delivery boundary

A remote endpoint must never be able to roll back or stall a workflow transition, so delivery is decoupled:

1. The state change writes a row into gov_delivery_outbox inside the same transaction.
2. gov_upstream_connectors holds the target URL per source system and a secret_ref — the name of the connector holding the signing secret. The secret itself is never stored in the outbox, never returned by the API and never logged.
3. GET /api/v1/gov/outbox exposes delivery state (without payloads) for operators.

Dispatching is intentionally left to a caller — a cron entry or the platform's scheduler — rather than adding a worker framework.

7. Example configurations

Local fulfilment

// 1. Create and publish the template
POST /api/v1/gov/workflows        { "template": "LOCAL_FULFILMENT" }
POST /api/v1/gov/workflow-versions/{id}/publish

// 2. Point the service at it
PUT  /api/v1/gov/services/{serviceId}/configuration
{ "fulfillment_mode": "LOCAL", "workflow_version_id": "…", "owner_unit_id": "…" }

A request then opens one task at the owning unit: RECEIVED → IN_PROGRESS → COMPLETED → CLOSED.

Delegated fulfilment with verification

POST /api/v1/gov/workflows        { "template": "DELEGATE_ONE_LEVEL" }
POST /api/v1/gov/workflow-versions/{id}/publish
PUT  /api/v1/gov/services/{serviceId}/configuration
{ "fulfillment_mode": "DELEGATE", "workflow_version_id": "…", "owner_unit_id": "<HQ>" }

Flow: HQ receives → delegate (child task opens at the district, HQ becomes FORWARDED) → district completes → child becomes AWAITING_VERIFICATION → HQ verify → child COMPLETED → HQ COMPLETED → close.

Returning instead of verifying puts the child in RETURNED for rework.

8. Migration and compatibility

Migration 00007_gov_workflow.sql is additive. Existing services, requests, timelines and appointments keep their rows.

Backfill for every tenant already using the module:

1. A root unit HQ is created.

2. A LEGACY_LOCAL workflow is created, given a single FULFILL step and published.

3. Services with no configuration are pointed at it in LOCAL mode.

4. Each existing request gets exactly one task carrying its state:

   gov_applications.status	gov_tasks.status
   SUBMITTED	RECEIVED
   IN_REVIEW	IN_PROGRESS
   INFO_REQUESTED	INFO_REQUESTED
   APPROVED	COMPLETED
   REJECTED	REJECTED
   COMPLETED	CLOSED
   CANCELLED	CANCELLED

One source of truth. gov_tasks holds the state. gov_applications.status remains as the compatibility field the original clients read, derived from the root task inside the same transaction by syncApplication — the two cannot drift.

The original endpoints (/services, /applications, /applications/{id}/…, /appointments, /officer/queue) keep working and now drive the same state machine underneath: a legacy submission opens a task, and a legacy decision is translated into a workflow action.

Deferred: binding /requests/ingest to OAuth2 client credentials. The platform issues opaque tokens and exposes /oauth2/introspect, so the remaining work is a middleware that introspects a bearer token, resolves the client to a tenant and injects a machine actor. Until then the endpoint requires an authenticated principal with gov.apply.

9. Permissions

They are enforced server-side through rbac.SQLPermissionStore, which walks memberships → membership_roles → role_permissions → permissions. The Go module and catalog/manifests/gov-services.json declare the same set. Hiding a button in the UI is a convenience, never the control.

10. API summary

/tasks supports status, unit_id, service_id, overdue, from, to, page and page_size, and returns {items, total, page, page_size}. Errors carry a stable code beside the human-readable error.

11. Testing

# State machine and routing (no database required)
cd backend && go test ./internal/apps/gov_services/...

# Full workflow against a migrated throwaway database
GOV_TEST_DATABASE_URL=postgres://… go test ./internal/apps/gov_services/...

The integration tests skip when GOV_TEST_DATABASE_URL is unset, so go test ./... stays green on a machine — or a CI runner — without a database.