Creating user interfaces

In IBM® Business Automation Workflow (Business Automation Workflow), human services provide the logic and user interface through which users can view and interact with business processes, data or process instances.

Client-side human services provide a lightweight alternative to the earlier human services in IBM BPM versions before V8.5.5. The earlier human services are referred to as heritage human services (deprecated). For more information, see Client-side human services and Difference between client-side human services and heritage human services.

Human services are self-contained, independently deployable units of user interface that use coaches to build the web pages that users see. Coaches comprise user interface elements called views. You use views to build a coach or page or multiple pages, then use the coach as part of a client-side human service to build the user interface that you need. You can create views in Process Designer. For information, see Coaches and Views.

Human services provide different types of user interfaces, such as task completion, startable service, dashboard, general purpose (URL-addressable), and process instance UI.
  • A task completion UI implements a specific activity within a process instance. It has access to the details of that process instance.
  • A dashboard is a stand-alone user interface that users can run at any time. Users can access dashboards through Process Portal. For more information, see Dashboards in Process Portal.
  • A startable service can be started in Process Portal at any time.
  • A URL service creates a stand-alone UI that can be called directly through a URL.
  • A process instance UI can be an instance details UI or a process launch UI. You can create custom process instance UIs and reuse them for other processes.
With heritage human services (deprecated), you can also use a coach-based dashboard as a WebSphere® portlet. For information, see Generating portlets for heritage human services exposed as dashboards.

Reusable coaches and views can be saved to toolkits, which are libraries that can be shared across process applications. For example, the UI toolkit provides a rich set of out-of-the-box views that you can use to create custom views from scratch or by aggregating other views. See UI toolkit.

Client-side human services can also contain scripts, other embedded client-side human services, and service calls to other services. For more information, see Modeling client-side human services.

For additional information on how to implement high-performance user interfaces, refer to Chapter 3.5: Performance considerations of the Deliver Modern UI for IBM BPM with the Coach Framework and Other Approaches IBM redbook. You can also access performance-related postings from other practitioners and users on the IBM dW Answers for business processes community.