Everything you need to get started.
In this tutorial, we explain how to design a business process that creates a people activity. This tutorial follows the tutorial "Creating forms to support people activities with the Form Editor" and assumes that the form created in that tutorial is accessible.
You may also be interested in looking at our screencast that shows how to create people activities on a slightly different example.
This tutorial requires version 5.0.
In the previous tutorial, we have created a form that can be used to support a "People Activity", we will now create a process that can creates such an activity for a user to perform it and return information back to the process.
First, let's model the process diagram.
Go to File > New > Business Process Diagram and create a new file "PA.bpm" in your project. In this tutorial, we will assume that the project is called PeopleActivity and the PA.bpm file is at the same location where the PA.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.
You may rename the pool that is created. Here we will call the pool "PA". The Task shape can be kept and reused later or deleted. Here we will assume it is deleted. To delete it, simply select it and press the Delete key.
Before our process may create a people activity, it needs to be started.
Before we continue to model the business process, let's explain why we have created to task shapes "Create People Activity" and "Complete People Activity". These two shapes will handle one single people activity. The first one - Create People Activity - consists in creating the people activity. When this task is performed, a new people activity is created and authorized users should see it in their task list. The Complete People Activity task is for receiving the information the user will submit. This may happen right after the people activity is created or a long time later. In between, the process may perform several tasks if necessary. The creation and the completion of a people activity are decoupled. This is essentially why we use 2 different shapes for one single people activity. There are other technical reasons as well that we will explain later in this tutorial.
Now we need to define the interactions between our process and a user who should perform the people activity.
If you have followed all the above instructions, your process should now look like the following (you can click the Autosize tool to automatically resize selected shape(s) to the default size):
Intalio|BPMS Workflow requires the "Create People Activity" and "Complete People Activity" to be "two-way operations". It is not sufficient to create just one link from "Create People Activity" to "PA-create", for instance. The response that is sent back provides the ability for the process to know whether the people activity was successfully created or not, and potentially act upon it.
Finally, we need some kind of event to start our process if we ever want to deploy and run it. We will leverage the Web Service Invocation tool in Intalio|BPMS Console t o start this process. However, for this to work, we need to model the fact that some other participant will start the process.
The process is now fully modeled, let's now implement it.
Let's now see how to actually integrate the PA form to support this interaction. We will need to do the following:
We should make sure that the User and Start pools define people participants and not a process participant, which means we should not generate BPEL code for these pools.
Now, we need to provide a quick description of the task as it will be displayed in the task list at runtime.
Finally, we may want to pass data to the form input. For example, here, we can pass the message text that is sent by the "Start" pool as the request input to our form:
The PA process is now fully designed. We may now deploy the form and the process in the runtime environment. See the next tutorial "Deploying Forms and Processes with People Activity with Intalio|BPMS 5.0".
Note to 4.X users: For those of you who have designed People Activities with Intalio|BPMS 4.X, you will notice that the following actions are no longer required:
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