Coaches

Coaches are the user interfaces for human services.

There are two types of user interfaces for human services: task completion and stand-alone service. To build either type of user interface for human services, you use coaches.

When a coach is a stand-alone service, such as a dashboard user interface, users access it through the Process Portal and can run it at any time. For information about dashboards, see Dashboards in Process Portal. Users can also access it as a WebSphere® portlet. For information, see Generating portlets for heritage human services exposed as dashboards.

When a coach is a task completion user interface, it is part of the human service flow. When the flow enters the coach, the user sees the user interface that is defined for that coach. The flow leaves the coach when a boundary event occurs. A coach can have multiple exit flows with each one associated with a different boundary event. At run time, the human task results in a work item in Process Portal, which the user navigates to see the user interface.

Coaches contain one or more coach views. The coach views provide the user interface elements and layout for the coach. Each coach view can contain one or more other coach views, which creates a parent-child relationship between these coach views. At run time, the parent coach view is rendered as a <div></div> tag that contains a nested <div></div> tag for each child coach view. Each coach view can also have a binding to a business object, CSS code to control its visual layout, and JavaScript to define its behavior.

Coach views are reusable so you can create a library of common user interfaces and behavior. You can combine these common user interfaces to rapidly develop new coaches. The Responsive Coaches toolkit and the Coaches toolkit (deprecated), which are included with IBM® BPM, contain common user interfaces that are called coach views (also referred to as controls). You can include these coach views when you are creating your own coaches.

Both client-side human services and heritage human services can have coaches. To maintain compatibility with earlier coaches, IBM BPM supports heritage coaches only in the heritage human services in the desktop Process Designer. Because heritage coaches are deprecated, no heritage coach support is provided with human services in the web Process Designer. A heritage coach has the technology and architecture of a coach in versions of IBM BPM before V8.0. Heritage coaches can be used only with heritage human services in the desktop Process Designer; they are not available with client-side human services or heritage human services in the web Process Designer. You can continue to use and maintain heritage coaches in the desktop Process Designer, but use coaches for new user interfaces for human services in the web Process Designer.