This chapter describes the screens related with the creation and management of process definitions and process instances.
Once you have modelled, configured all the technical details and build and deployed your projects containing your business processes you should be able to see all the available process definitions in the Process Definition List. For all the process definitions listed in the Process Definitions List you will be able to inspect the Process Definition details and start as many Process Instances as needed. The following sections describes the features provided by all the screens in charge of the manupulation of process definitions and process instances. You can find these screens under the Process Management Menu, in the jBPM Console NG or in KIE Workbench.
You can find the source code related with the process definition and instances manupilation inside this module: http://github.com/droolsjbpm/jbpm-console-ng/tree/master/jbpm-console-ng-process-runtime Feel free to report issues, send Pull Requests and get in contact with the team via comments in github.
The process definition section is composed by two main screens: the Process Definition Lists and the Process Definition Details.
The process definition list shows all the available process definitions that were deployed into the platform. Look at the Deployments section for more information about how to check all the deploymed units available in the platform runtime.
You can click in the list rows to access to the details of the process definition.
The process definition details shows all the available information about the process definition. You can consider this screen as a brief about the process model. You can quickly see if there is a Sub Process associated with it, or how many users and groups are participating in the selected definition.
Notice that you can View the Process Model (Read Only mode) using the Options Menu in the top bar. You can also look at all the process instances for the selected process definition by going to Options -> View Process Instances.
You can create new Process Instances from the Process Definition List (Action Column) or from the Process Definition Detail view.
When you create a Process Instance usually a Form will be presented to introduce the information required by the process to be started. Once you complete the required information and click on the Submit button, the instance will be created and the details of the Process Instance will be displayed on top of the Process Definition Details.
The process instances section is composed by two main screens: the Process Instance Lists and the Process Instance Details. In this case the Process Instance Details provides several tabs with the runtime information related with the process.
Each row inside the process instance list represent a running process instance from a particular Process Definition. Each execution is differentiated from all the others by the internal state of the information that the process is manipulating. In order to inspect this information you can click in each row to see the process instance details.
As you can see the Process Instance Detail first tab gives you a quick overview about what is going on inside the process. This is by showing the current state of the instance and also the current activity that is being executed. The process variables tab display all the process variables that are being manipulated by the instance with the exception of the variables that contains documents.
If the process contains a variable of the type: org.jbpm.Document it will be listed in the Documents tab, for easy access, download and manipulation of the attached documents. Notice that at this point you cannot attach new documents to currently running instances, but this feature will be added in future versions.
Finally, the Logs tab shows two types of logs for different end users. There are two types of Logs available inside the tab: Business and Technical.
To complement the process logs you can open the Process Model that shows the completed activies in grey and the current activities highlighted in red.
This chapter introduces the Task Management screens and the its integration with the Form Modeller component to allow users to work on their assigned tasks. You can find the source code of these screens here: https://github.com/droolsjbpm/jbpm-console-ng/tree/master/jbpm-console-ng-human-tasks . Feel free to report issues, send Pull Requests and get in contact with the team via comments in github. At the end of this section you will find a technical description about how to customize these views.
Every user with access to the platform will have access to its personal task list where tasks assigned to him/her will be displayed. Each user will be able to create its own personal tasks or work on tasks that were create as a result of a business process execution.
You can access to the Task List under the Tasks main menu:
Pending tasks for each user will be displayed in their task list screen. Notice that you will not be able to see assigned tasks from another user different from the one that is currenlty logged in.
If you are interested in having a tabular view of all the pending tasks for a specific person or group you can use the Grid View. The list will show all the pending tasks ordered by the columns presented. You can change the default ordering clicking on the column header. This view offer a more traditional BPM Task List view where you can sort the data based on different columns.
You can filter your tasks based on the task status:
Active: all the Active tasks that user can work on. That means Personal and Group Tasks.
Personal: all the personal tasks that already belong to the user.
Group: all the group tasks that needs to be claimed by the user in order to start working on them.
All: show all the tasks no matter the status. It will show completed tasks as well with the exception of completed tasks that belongs to a process that is already finished. In such cases the tasks are cleaned up after the process is completed and for that reason they will not be displayed.
Admin: show all the tasks where the currently logged user was set as business administrator for such task.
You can access to the Task Details by clicking in a task row. The details associated with a task can be changed, like for example the Due Date, the Priority or the task description.
You can also view the Process Context for a specific task. If the task was created by a Business Process, you will have access to see the Process Instance status that has created it.
The Task Assignments tab allows you to delegate the task to another person or group if you are not able to continue working on it.
You can also add while you are working on a task comments about the progress.
Tasks can have associated a Form to store data. If tasks are part of a Business Process, usually some data needs to be collected and propagated to the business process for further usage. For that reason, tasks has to provide a way to gather and store data. Forms can be created for specific tasks using the Form Modeller. If no form is provided a dynamic form will be created based on the information that the task needs to handle. If a task is created as an ad-hoc task (not related with any process) there will be no such information to generate a form and only basic actions will be provided.
As mentioned in the introduction a User can create their own tasks, which will not be associated with any Business Process. These tasks can be used to keep track of your personal list of TO DOs. You can also create tasks and assign them to different people in your team or group.
