Stepping through a process in the desktop Process Designer (deprecated)

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This topic only applies to BAW, and is located in the BAW repository. Last updated on 2025-03-13 12:15

Step through process execution to ensure that your process works as expected.

About this task

When you run a process, you can step through the execution to ensure that your process works as expected. You can use this functionality for team playbacks and to help debug your process.

To perform this task, you must be in the IBM® Process Designer desktop editor, which is deprecated.

Note: To learn more about the Inspector interface before you begin, see Inspector reference.

Procedure

Open a process in Process Designer.
Optional: To view instances running on a different server or to view instances for a different version of the BPD, select a different server or snapshot from the drop-down menus in the toolbar.

Important: Remote process servers must be connected to your Workflow Center to be available. To learn how to connect to a remote process server, see Customizing the Workflow Server settings used to connect to Workflow Center and Using the administrative console to customize the Workflow Server settings used to connect to Workflow Center. To run a process on a different server using the Inspector, you must first deploy the process application snapshot that contains the process that you want to run as described in Installing snapshots on a connected workflow server. If you click the Run icon while All versions is selected from the list of snapshots, the Inspector runs the most recent snapshot of the process (BPD) on the Workflow Center server. For remote process servers, the snapshots available are limited to the snapshots that are deployed on that server.
Click the Run button in the upper right corner.
When you are prompted to change to the Inspector interface, click Yes.
Note: Select the check box if you want Process Designer to change interfaces without prompting for approval.
In the Process Instances tab, click the new or received task and then click the Run button.
In some cases, you might need to select a user account or provide a password for a specific user account in order to run a task. This is controlled by lane assignments and routing for activities. See Assigning teams to processes and lanes and Assigning teams to process activities for more information.
Complete the task when it runs. For example, if the task generates a Coach, enter requested values and complete the form. When the task is complete, you return to the Inspector.
Click the Refresh icon in the toolbar.
The Inspector shows the progress by moving the token to the next step in both the diagram and the navigation tree.
Note: If your process (BPD) includes an attached timer event, you can right-click the timer event token in the navigation tree and select Fire Timer to trigger the event.
You can expand subprocesses, event subprocesses, and linked processes as you step through their contents by double-clicking on the activity in the diagram view. Even if you do not expand a subprocess activity, you still step through activities contained in the subprocess.
To see the variables passed from step to step, click the process node in the navigation tree.
Right-click a variable and then click Show in Execution Evaluator.
The Inspector opens the Execution Evaluator tab and shows the values for the parameters within the selected variable.
You can use the Execution Evaluator to inspect the variable values as they change through the flow of the process.
Note: You can also manipulate variables in the Execution Evaluator using JavaScript expressions to validate your process implementation. To do so, enter the JavaScript expression and click the Run icon at the top of the Evaluator. The results are displayed in the bottom pane of the tab.
In the Process Instances tab, click the task for the next step, and then click the Run task icon.
Click the Refresh icon in the toolbar.
You can tell that the process is complete when the final step has a status of Closed and there are no active tokens in the diagram or navigation tree.