Example: Building a heritage human service with coaches

Build a heritage human service when you want a step in your BPD to create an interactive task that process participants can perform in a web-based user interface.

Before you begin

To perform this task, start the Process Designer desktop editor.

About this task

If you add an activity to a non-system lane in a BPD, the activity is initially implemented using the default heritage human service. You can double-click an activity in a non-system lane to open the default heritage human service. By examining the service components and running the default service in the Inspector, you can get an idea of how heritage human services work and how coaches are used to display and collect data from process participants.

The following steps describe how to build a sample heritage human service using example values. The service in the sample enables employees to enter expenses for the Expense Reimbursement BPD. This BPD contains an activity that is called Enter Expenses and a private variable called request. The request variable is an EmployeeReimbursement business object, which has id(String), type(String), amount(Decimal), and status(String) parameters. For more information, see Creating custom business objects in Process Designer. For your own implementation, you might not use the same steps or names.

Note: The following procedure shows how to use the Activity wizard to create a heritage human service. You can also create a heritage human service from scratch as described in Building a heritage human service.

Procedure

  1. Starting with the Expense Reimbursement BPD, right-click the Enter Expenses activity and select Activity Wizard from the list of options.
  2. In Activity Wizard - Setup Activity, make the following selections:
    • Under Activity Type Selection, select User Task.
    • Under Library Element Selection, select Create a new heritage human service.
  3. Type a name for the new heritage human service in the Name field. (The name for this sample service is Enter Expense.)
  4. In Activity Wizard - Setup Activity, click the Next button.
  5. In Activity Wizard - Parameters, choose the existing process variables to use as input and output for this new service.
    1. You can see the private variable named request. For this sample, set Input to false and leave Output set to true. This enables you to collect the data for the expense using this new service and then output those values for the subsequent process steps to act upon.
    2. Click Finish. The new heritage human service is created and attached to the activity. The new service includes a single coach.
  6. Double-click the activity for which you created the new heritage human service. The new heritage human service opens in the heritage human service editor in the Designer view.
  7. Click the Coaches tab and then click the listed coach component. Because you used the Activity wizard, the coach includes a form element for each of the parameters in the request structure. The coach designer is where you customize the coach layout and create or edit the bindings between inputs and outputs. Notice that when the coach designer is open, the Palette view shows all the elements (sections and controls) that you can use in a coach. Hover over a control to view a brief description. For more information about the coach designer, see Building heritage coaches.

    The items in the palette are described in the links at the bottom of this page.

  8. In the coach designer, right-click the Status control (input text field) and select Delete from the list of options. The status of a request is not data that is collected from employees, but is a value set later after a request is further processed and so it can be removed.
  9. Click Id (input text field). In the properties, you can see the label for the field is Id: to match the parameter in the request variable. Change the label to Employee ID so that employees know exactly which ID to provide.
  10. Click the Type control (input text field). In the properties, you can see the label for the field is Type to match the parameter in the request variable. Change the label to Employee type.
  11. To enable employees to select from an existing list of employee types, in the properties for Employee type, from the Control Type list choose Single Select.
    1. Select the Presentation option in the properties. Under Widget Style, select Drop Down List for Widget Type.
    2. Under Manual Data, click Add to add a value and associated display text for each option that you want in the drop-down list.
  12. To add a Cancel button to the coach, select the control that contains OK in the coach designer.
    1. In the Presentation properties for the control, go to the Buttons section and click Add.
    2. In the Button Details field, enter Cancel for the label and click Is Cancel.
  13. Click Save in the main toolbar.
  14. Click the Preview tab at the bottom of the coach designer to view the coach. The Preview tab shows how the coach appears to users when the BPD runs. You can also click Run Service in the upper right to view the coach in a web browser.
Parent topic: Examples of building services with heritage coaches