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Designing People Initiating Processes with Intalio|BPMS 5.0 (Intermediate)

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In this tutorial, we explain how to design a business process that is started by a user by integrating a form created with the form editor. This tutorial follows the tutorial "Creating forms to initiate a process with the Form Editor" and assumes that the form created in that tutorial is accessible.

Process Model

First, let's model the process diagram.

  1. Go to File > New > Business Process Diagram and type PIPA in the file name to create a new file "PIPA.bpm" in your project. In this tutorial, we will assume that the diagram is called PIPA.bpm in the PIPA project, ie at the same location where the PIPA.xform form was created. Note that there is no requirement for the diagram to be located in the same folder as the form, they only need to be in the same project.
  2. You may rename the pool that is created. Here we will call the pool "PIPA". The Task can be kept and renamed anything you like. Here we will call it "Init". To rename a pool, just double-click on its name.
  3. Create a new pool to represent the user who will start the process. We will rename this new pool as "User", right click on the pool and select "Set pool non executable" since we need to express that our User pool is not a process participant but a people participant.
  4. Drag-and-drop the PIPA.xform from from the Process Explorer into the "User" pool. A menu pops-up, select "Make 'init' task for PIPA form". This creates a new task 'PIPA-init' in your User pool.
  5. Create a message link first from the "PIPA-init" to the "Init" task, and then another message link from the "Init" task back to the "PIPA-Init".

If you have followed all the above instructions, your process should now look like the following (you can right-click on it and select "View Image" to see it in full resolution):

pipamodel.jpg

Intalio|BPMS Workflow requires this interaction to be a "two-way operation". It is not sufficient to create just one link from the "Submit name and email" task to the "Init" task. The response that is sent back the the user provides the ability for the process to refuse the request or acknowledge it. In the workflow user interface, when the user submits the form, the form is replaced by a page that will inform the user whether his/her request succeeded or not.

Process Design

To complete the implementation of this PIPA process, we first need to define the users and/or roles who should be authorized to access our PIPA form to start the PIPA process from the Workflow UI:


  1. In the Properties view, select the "Workflow" tab.
  2. In the Role(s) field, type "examples\employee" (without quotes). The employee role is defined by default in Intalio|BPMS Community Edition under the "examples" realm.
At this stage, your process diagram should look like the following:

piparoles.jpg

You can also define a description for the PIPA-init activity.

  1. Select the PIPA-init activity in the User pool
  2. In the Properties view, select the Workflow tab.
  3. In the Description field, type a description. We will type PIPA here.

This description will be displayed in the workflow UI when a user with the "employee" role will want to access the PIPA form to initiate our PIPA process.


Conclusion

Your first PIPA process is now fully implemented. Your process should be valid and you should be able to deploy it to Intalio|BPMS Server. This is what we will look at in the next tutorial "Deploying People Initiating Processes with Intalio|BPMS 5.0".

Note to 4.X users: For those of you who have designed People Initiating Process Activities with Intalio|BPMS 4.X, you will notice that the following actions are no longer required:

  • No need to define message names and schemas: they are automatically found when drag-and-dropping the form.
  • No need to set the status of the initProcessResponse message to OK: this information is automatically generated in the BPEL code.
  • No need to create a deployment descriptor file: this file is automatically generated.

 

Last Updated ( Dec 04 2007 )
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