Is there a good practice of what to use as a placeholder/link to go to the process map from a BPMN process? The idea is that people start with the process map that is linked to detailed processes but I am looking for a user-friendly way to let them go back to the process map fast, without having to look for it in the menu. (Currently using ADONIS tool)
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I have recently been tasked to look into Workflow Foundation. The actual goal would be to implement a system in which the end users can define custom workflows in the deployed application (and of course, use them). Personally I have never used WF before (and reading around here on SO people are very doubtful about it - so am I reading those questions/answers), and I am having a hard time finding my way around it given the sparse learning resources available.
Anyway, there are some questions, for example, this, which mention something they call dynamic or user-defined workflows. They point out that WF makes it possible to "rehost" the designer, so that end-users can define their own new workflows after the application is deployed (without developer intervention (?), this is the part I am not really sure about).
I have been told by fellow employees that this way we could implement an application in which once this feature is implemented we would no longer have to keep modifying the application every time a new workflow is to be implemented. However, they also pointed out that they just "heard it", they don't have firsthand experience themselves either.
I have been looking around for samples online but the best thing I could find was a number guess app - barely more than a simple hello world. So not much that would point me to the right direction of how this user-defined workflow feature actually works and how it can be used, what its limitations are etc.
My primary concern is this: it is alright that one can define custom workflows but no workflow is worth a penny without the possibility of actually inputting data throughout the process. For example, even if the only thing I need to do is to register a customer in a complaint management system, I would need the customer's name, contact, etc. If the end user should be able to define any workflow the given toolset makes possible then of course there needs to be a way to provide the workflow consumers with a way of inputting data through forms. If the workflow can be of pretty much any nature then so needs to be the data - otherwise if we need to implement the UIs ourselves then this "end-user throws together a workflow" feature is kind of useless because they would still end up at us requiring to implement a form or some sort of data input for the individual steps.
So I guess that there should be a way of defining the "shape" of the data that needs to be filled at any given user interaction phase of the workflow which I can investigate and dynamically generate forms based on the data. So for example, if I found that the required data was made up of a name and a date of birth, then I would need to render a textbox and a datepicker on the page.
What I couldn't really figure out from the Q&As here and elsewhere is whether this is even possible. Can I define and then later "query" the structure of the data to be passed to the workflow at any point? If so, how? If not, how should this user-defined workflow feature even be used, what is it good for?
To clarify it a little, I could imagine something as specifying a complex type, which would be the view model (input model) in a regular MVC app, and then I could reflect over it, get the properties and render input fields based on that.
Windows Workflow Foundation is about machine workflows, not business workflows. True, it is the foundational tool set Microsoft created for building their business workflow products. But out of the box WWF does not have the components you need to quickly and easily build business workflows. If you want to send an email in a workflow, you have to write that from scratch. Just about anything you can think of doing from a business point of view you have to write from scratch.
If you want to easily create business workflows using Microsoft products check out the workflow stuff in SharePoint. It is the easiest of the Microsoft products to work with (in my experience.) If that does not meet your needs there are other products like BizTalk.
K2 is another company with a business workflow product that uses WWF as their base to more easily build business workflows, the older K2 products actually create web pages automatically to collect the data from the user.
WWF is very low level, arguably it lost traction after they re-wrote the whole thing in 4.0. While not publically stated by Microsoft, my personal opinion is Service Fabric (from Microsoft) achieves the goals WWF originally tried to solve which was a "more robust programming environment."
I'm doing some research on the workflow concepts and specifically BPMN standard. And I'm mostly interested in the available software on the subject.
I've already studied software like Activiti and jBPM, both of which are implemented in Java. As great as they are, I'm looking for something else. Even though such software call themselves BPM Engine I would rather name them BPM Engine Servers. They are stand alone servers (with web based GUI) which makes it really hard to embed them in other servers.
Now my question is: Is there a concept as BPM Engine in the manner it only executes the given BPM with the given data, only one step? Without any GUI or direct user interaction (something like a library)? What should I search for? What is it named? Are my expectations valid?
[UPDATE]
I've spent the last hours studying Activiti's user guide. I'm still not sure if I can use it the way I want it to! And I'll be grateful if someone can confirm it.
I'm interested in a console-like application which I can run whenever I like, give it the previously running process (most likely serialized as a string). The engine should construct the process based on the given history.
Once the process is reconstructed, I would like to move it forward one step by telling it what has happened. Then it should inform me of the next tasks to be performed and shutdown.
Finally I'll be storing the updated process after getting it as a string (the engine should serialize it in a way so it can unserialize it later).
I don't want the engine to have its own database or memory storage. I want it to shutdown completely once it's done. This is what I mean by Engine, no user interaction, no storage access.
Can any of the BPM engines perform in such a way?
perhaps I am missing your point, but Activiti is really nothing more than a jar file that can be embedded in any other java application. Certainly in order to run Activiti in any meaningful way you need a backing datastore (database) and one or more process definition, but as you can see from the unit tests that are part of Activiti, the database can be in memory and the process definition can be included in the war. There are many examples of Activiti (and likely jBPM) used as simply an embedded state machine with no exposed UI or user interaction.
My company has implemented a number of such solutions for different organizations.
If I have missed your point, feel free to give me an example of your requirement, I'm sure we have addressed it at one time or another.
You might be interested in Bonita BPM.
This open source BPM solution offers an execution engine that can be used as a standalone.
Just like its competitors, it also offers an optional GUI in the form of a web based application: Bonita Portal.
I think the challenge for what you want to do is that most of the BPM Engines separate the definition of the process from the execution. So for most of them you need someplace that will allow you to store the definition long term (typically a database) and then they track the state of a given instance of that definition for you.
If you wanted a truly stateless BPMN "interpretation" engine, then your serialized data would have to include not only the current state of the process, but he process definition as well. I'm sure this can be done, but I don't think any of the engines have taken this approach as doing so would add complexity to the solution, and solves a problem that not many people seem to be asking about.
Additionally it begs the question "given that we now have a process that knows what task it is on, how does that task actually get executed?" In most of the solutions I've seen the execution of the task takes place in the same server as the engine. In some where the execution is in a different technology, the "executor" doesn't understand the Process much at all except to make a call to signal "okay this thing is done" and the engine handles what happens next. You want to have this data in a serialize data structure of some sort, so the question would arise "If we have this stateless BPMN Engine, would the executor of the task have to update the serialized data to indicate the state change for the task".
There are other requirements of the BPMN specification that I think would make your approach very difficult, such as how to handle items like Intermediate Message Events that are either waiting for a specific time, or a message, before moving the process forward. While all of these are potentially solvable, it certainly would take significant re-engineering of current approaches.
I've learned a lot about Erlang the last couple of days and am familiar with component entity systems.
With the process centric approach of Erlang I would suggest that each entity would be an Erlang process instance. As for the CES (Component Entity System) approach I would have a process for like a "MovementSystem" for entities that own a MovementComponent (for example). I would then with tail-recursion "iterate" over all registered entities and send them messages to let them update their own process state rather than doing that as batch-processing by the MovementSystem itself... (what I then wouldn't call an entity system anymore, because in my understanding a CES has all information of all entity and components it is processing, which would mean "shared memory", which is by concept not part of Erlang)
Are those two approaches/paradigms - Erlang and "Component Entity System" - excluding each other, or am I missing something?
(I wouldn't even call this prototype on GitHub (https://gist.github.com/sntran/2986790) a real Component Entity System. This approach there looks more that the Entity-System, it rather looks to me as an gen_event based MQ-approach, for which I would probably use RabbitMQ instead... but that's not relevant here...)
Right now I don't see how these two concepts are even possible to get combined...
Okay, I did further research...
-> https://stackoverflow.com/a/1637134/3850640
This answer to another question to erlang explained it pretty well to me
One thing Erlang isn't really good at: processing big blocks of data.
Where a CES by nature handles a lot of data at once...
So, my answer would be "Yes, it is possible, but not a pretty good choice"...
I do not know about CES, but I do think that you are missing some things.
each entity would be an Erlang process instance
...
let them update their own process state rather than doing that as batch-processing by the MovementSystem itself
...
which would mean "shared memory", which is by concept not part of Erlang
It sounds as if you want to hold all your state in one place. The simplest way to do this is to use one process and have that process keep its own state. However, there are other ways: you could have a "global state" process that everyone can talk to. You can think of ETS as an example of this. Putting the shared state in a separate process makes synchronization much easier.
If you want to do parallel processing, there are many ways to arrange your code: you could have MovementSystem gen_server:cast to all MovementComponents and have them handle things. This probably works best if the different components of an entity interact and you need to know if something is trying to move and talk at the same time. If components are more independent, you might want to just spawn one-off jobs to handle the movement. Finally, it might be the case that running all movement code in serial is cheap and you just want one process per system.
While looking at existing code and my own applications, sometimes it's easy to get lost in the application logic flow in terms of where I am in the framework and what dependency files were processed before the final view.
Is there diagram generation script that is able to give a diagram of all of the dependencies from the start of a request evaluation to when a page is drawn? Heck, I'd even not mind to be able to drill down into variables visually across the structure similar to ddd.
For example, it might go something like:
other dependencies -> app/views/layout/application.html.haml ->
app/views/shared/_header.html.haml -> layout/application.html.haml ->
app/views/home/index.html.haml
If this diagram were visual then you could show loop backs or just demonstrate a hierarchy of repetitive access, or even this might work:
other dependencies
app/views/layout/application.html.haml
shared/_header.html.haml
home/index.html.haml
Ultimately something like fseventer app for Mac OS X could perhaps have been a close enough match, however it doesn't seem to show the shell spawned activity. If it did it could be a wonderful example of perhaps what I'm talking about.
Look for railroad.
http://railroad.rubyforge.org/
I know there is a lot of talk about BPM these days and I am conscious that some may see it to be a craze rather than a fundamentally important piece of software.
As someone from what most would call 'The Business', I have been doing my best to learn about BPM to ensure we continue to make decisions that not only make sense to the business, but IT as well.
I have noticed while reading that mention is made to application workflow when sometimes discussing BPM. I hadn't given this much thought until recently.
Therefore, what is the difference? When would you use one and not the other?
BPM is about the process and improving it, which takes into account users and potentially more than one application,e.g. an ERP system may have more than one application to it, though there may be other uses of the term. Note that the process could be viewed without what applications or technologies are used.
Application workflow is how an application is used to go from a to b. Here it is a specific set of code that is used and what happens over the course of an application getting from a to b. In this case, the application is front and center rather than the process.
Does that provide an answer? Another way to think of it is that multiple application workflows can make up a system which is used in a process that can have BPM applied to it.
Late to the game, but workflow is to database as BPMS is to DBMS. (Convenient how the letters line up, huh?)
IOW, BPM(S) is traditionally meant to refer to a particular framework/application that allows you to manage business processes: defining them, storing them, versioning them, measuring them, etc. This is similar to how a DBMS manages databases.
Now, a workflow is a definition, much like a database is a definition. In the former case, it is a definition of operations/work (Fufill Order), steps thereof (Send Invoice) and rules/constraints on the work (If no stock, send notice). In the latter, similar case, it is a definition of data structure (CREATE TABLE) and constraints (InvoiceTotal must be > $0.00).
I think this is a potentially confusing subject, particular as some development environments use a type of process flow model to generate user facing applications (I'm thinking about Outsystems here, for example).
But, for me, the distinction is crystal clear. Application workflow, as people talk about it, refers to a user's path through an application, i.e. the pages they complete/visit, the data they enter, etc. on their way to completing a transaction of some sort. Application orkflow is a poor term for this though, I think application flow would be more meaningful.
BPM on other hand, is about modelling and executing a workflow process. By workflow, in this context, I mean a series of discrete steps (or tasks) that have to be completed (either programmatically or via human interaction) in a certain order to complete a process. These tasks can be implemented as individual application modules (each with their own "application workflow", see above). The job of the workflow engine is to make sure that these separate steps are assigned to the right people (of groups of people) in the right sequence, and that overall the process completes in an orderly way.
I don't think there's a clear answer to this at all. These are words, as opposed to theoretical concepts. If you add the word "checklist" into the mix - that just turns out to be a linear version of a process (but you can have conditionals in checklists - making them a workflow).
I am not sure how to help in reframing this question, but it's almost as if no answer can ever be possible. My own thoughts are at https://tallyfy.com/improving-efficiency-workflow-vs-business-process-management/