Which artifacts should I use?

IBM® Business Automation Workflow has a number of different artifacts that you can use to create or modify a user interface. These artifacts consist of client-side human services, heritage human services (deprecated), responsive coaches and coach views (deprecated), heritage coaches (deprecated), and UI views.

To help you determine which of these artifacts you should use, there are factors you must consider. The following diagram summarizes your choices and the text discusses these factors to help you with your choices.
New or existing human services? New leads to use client-side human services with coaches and UI views in the Process Designer. Existing leads to using either client-side human services or heritage human services with UI coaches and views in the Process Designer, or to creating heritage human services with heritage coaches in the desktop Process Designer.

Your first decision is whether to use client-side human services or heritage human services.

Client-side human services

Client-side human services are the latest technology in IBM Business Automation Workflow for choreographing user interfaces. To use client-side human services, you must be in the Process Designer.

Client-side human services are built in the Process Designer and run in a web browser. When you are using client-side human services, you are provided with sets of UI views and responsive coach views (deprecated), which you can use to create coaches and complex user interfaces.

It is generally recommended that you use client-side human services unless one or more of the following conditions apply:

Heritage human services (deprecated)

If one or more of the conditions listed earlier apply, use heritage human services. To create or edit heritage human services you can use the Process Designer or the Process Designer desktop editor.

The Process Designer provides support for heritage human services to facilitate migration from the desktop Process Designer. You can update your heritage human services in phases over time and eventually convert them to client-side human services. If you work with heritage human services in the Process Designer, you can convert the deprecated responsive coach views into UI views and use the grid layout to modernize your user interfaces. See Converting deprecated functions. You can also use the simple validation pattern that the Process Designer provides to validate the data in your coaches. See Validating coaches in heritage human services.

Heritage human services run on the server but display their user interfaces in a web browser. A process application can have both heritage human services and client-side human services and both types can use the same views. Whether you choose to use client-side human services or heritage human services, make sure that you avoid mixing UI views, responsive coach views (deprecated), and non-responsive coach views in the same coach.

When you are using heritage human services, you must decide whether to use responsive coaches, coaches, or heritage coaches for a particular user interface. A heritage human service can have responsive coaches, coaches, and heritage coaches in its flow.

Heritage coaches are user interfaces that were created in IBM BPM versions earlier than V8.0 and are now deprecated.
  • Generally, you should use coaches with UI views unless you are updating existing heritage coaches. If the update is extensive in scope, that is, you need to update a number of similar heritage coaches, consider replacing the deprecated heritage coaches with coaches to take advantage of the ability to reuse the views that Business Automation Workflow provides.
  • If you must update earlier user interfaces by using the same artifacts that were originally used to create them, you can use heritage coaches. Support for creating heritage coaches is provided in the desktop Process Designer only. In the Process Designer, you can display heritage coaches alongside coaches in the Coaches view, and edit them in XML view only.