Building a heritage human service

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

1. Open the Process Designer desktop editor.
2. Open a process application in the Designer view.
3. In New Service, enter a name for the service and click Finish. IBM Process Designer displays the diagram of the service with the default Start Event and End Event components.
4. In a BPD diagram, drop an activity into a non-system lane and then rename the activity. Activities dropped into any lane but System have the default heritage human service implementation. In the remaining steps, you replace this default heritage human service with your own.
5. Right-click the activity and select Activity Wizard from the list of options.
6. In the Setup Activity page of the wizard, select Create a heritage human service.
7. If the BPD has variables that are defined, click Next. In the Parameters page of the wizard, set whether each business process variable is an input or output of the heritage human service. For example, if you have business process variable that is named request and the heritage human service is to collect data to create that request for the server, set its Input to false and Output to true. The heritage human service then provides the data for the subsequent process activities to act upon.
8. Click Finish. The activity now has an associated heritage human service that includes a simple diagram.
   
   The coach in the diagram has the following default content:
   • If you added one or more business process variables that are primitive types, the coach has an appropriate stock control in the layout for each of these variables.
   • If you added one or more business process variables that are complex types and they have an associated coach view, the coach has that coach view for each of these variables.
   • If you added one or more business process variables that are complex types and they do not have an associated coach view, the coach has a placeholder message for each of these variables. When you are building the coach, you replace each placeholder with a coach view that is appropriate for the variable and how the coach is using it. For example, if you have a Customer business object, you could replace the placeholder with a Customer View coach view that displays customer data in a set of text fields.
   • A button that provides the boundary event that you can use to wire the coach to the end node.
   This default content is for your convenience and you can use it or replace it.
9. In the heritage human service diagram, create the service flow by adding elements from the palette and wire the elements together to create a flow. See Service components in Process Designer for information about the elements that you can add to the diagram.
   Restriction: You cannot wire out from a coach unless the coach (or one of its child coach views) contains at least one element that fires a boundary event. You can use the Button stock control to fire a boundary event, or you can create a custom control that fires a boundary event. For more information, see Coaches toolkit: Button stock control.
10. In the Variables page, add business process variables to support your service flow.
    Tip: If you provide HTML code as a default value for a variable, wrap the code using the other type of quotation mark. For example, if the HTML values use double quotation marks, wrap the entire code in single quotation marks as shown in the following example:

    '<font color="#f08080"><b>Some text!</b></font>'

11. In the Coaches page, create the user interfaces used in the service flow. For more information, see Building coaches.
12. Click Save in the main toolbar.
13. To view the service flow in a web browser, click the button.
14. Iterate through steps 7 - 11 until the service flows correctly and the user interface is correct.
15. If you want to expose the heritage human service outside of the business process (for example, in the Process Admin Console or as a page in Process Portal), set the exposure in the Overview page of the service. For more information, see Exposing heritage human services.
    If you are building the heritage human service in a toolkit instead of in a process application, to expose the heritage human service as a page in Process Portal, you must also do the following steps:

    1. Create a snapshot of the toolkit.
    2. Activate the toolkit snapshot. For more information, see Activating snapshots for use with IBM Process Portal.
    3. Add the toolkit snapshot as a dependency to a process application. For more information, see Creating, changing, and deleting a toolkit dependency in the Designer view.
16. If you do not want to automatically synchronize shared business objects that are inputs to this service when the business object is changed in other instances, in the Overview tab, clear the Automatically sync shared business objects option.
    Important: Nested services inherit the synchronization behavior of the starting service. In addition, if you have a service that runs custom logic and then explicitly saves your shared business objects, always clear the automatic synchronization option. Otherwise, the shared business object is automatically saved and the code in your service will not run.