Workflow basics

Workflows consist of work items linked together. A workflow may have one or more starting point. Each work item performs a specific task (accept an online form, send an email, assign a task, write to a database, etc...). In Business Pilot Studio, workflows reside under the Workflows folder.

As the designer of a workflow, your rule is to draw and configure your business process so that it can be deployed in the Business Pilot workflow engine. To do so, Business Pilot Studio provides you with a powerful drag and drop whiteboard, where you will be able to place the different pieces of your workflow and link them together.

Once this task is done, save your workflow and deploy it to the workflow engine so that it can be used.

Workflows may have three different states:

		Workflow never deployed
		Workflow deployed
		Workflow deployed but a new version is available for deployment

You can deploy a workflow at any time. When you deploy a workflow, currently running instances of the old workflow will terminate. Any new instance will utilize the new workflow definition. This allows a smooth transition between different versions of a workflow.

Creating a workflow using an online form

Business Pilot Studio comes with several wizards to help you create workflows. The simplest one of them is the Simple form workflow. It creates a workflow with two steps: An online form, and a confirmation page. While it does not perform any real business value, this workflow shows the basics of managing forms, collecting data and making it available to other work items in the same workflow.

Select any folder under the Workflow folder. From the menu bar, select Workflow->New->Simple form workflow. This will open the wizard, which asks you to specify a location within the Web site. This location will define the Internet address of the form generated by the wizard. To create a valid location, select the folder you would like to place the form under and press New form to create the form location. Press Finish to complete the wizard. As part of the workflow creation process, the wizard will ask you if you would like it to deploy the workflow for you. Choose yes for your first workflow, so that you can see it in action. The workflow opens, and is in the deployed state.

Click on the form URL displayed by the configuration panel below the whiteboard. This will take you directly to the form used to trigger the workflow. Enter some data and watch it work. Once the data is submitted, the first work item is done executing and the workflow progresses to the second step, which is also a web page. In this case, it is used as a confirmation page.

Business Pilot Studio has a built-in form editor, which lets you drag and drop visual components on a form. To open the form wizard, either double-click on a form work item in the workflow, or select it and press the edit button on the configuration panel.

	This form has one input field called Entered text. This means that when the user click the submit button, the form will collect the data placed in this field and make it available to other work items in the workflow under the name Entered text.
	Work items collect data from other steps in the workflow through Business Pilot's dynamic data mechanism. Open the page 2 form to see it work. When configuring an item, if it is possible to use dynamic data, then the wrench icon will be displayed next to an entry field. Clicking on this icon will open the dynamic data browser, which shows all the work items in the workflow and the data they make available to other items. The data exported by each item varies based on its type and its configuration. The syntax used to represent dynamic data is {A->B}, where A is the name of a work item, and B is the name of one data attribute it exports. Anytime dynamic data is used in the configuration of a work item, it is replaced by the appropriate value available in the workflow at the time the step is executed. The image below shows the live data browser, which allows you to point and click on the data you would like to use from other work items. Note that the data will only be populated with a value if the step has been traversed. Otherwise, its value is an empty string.

Now, that you have a functional workflow, complete it by adding a step that sends the data entered on the first page in an email to yourself. Click on the lock button to make your workflow editable again. When done, save your workflow and deploy it to the workflow engine so the new version can be used.

Once the email work item is added, add a link from the page 2 to the new step.

Then simply configure the email itself by specifying the sender, recipient, subject and message.