Coaches

Coaches are the user interfaces for human services.

You can use coaches to build different types of user interfaces, such as task completion, dashboard, startable service, general purpose (URL-addressable), and process instance UI.

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.

A dashboard is a stand-alone user interface that users can run at any time. Users can access dashboards through Process Portal. 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.

A startable service can be started in Process Portal at any time. For a general purpose UI, 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.

Coaches and views
Coaches build the web pages for your user interface. Inside each coach you can have one or multiple views. The views provide the user interface elements and layout for the coach. Each view instance can share parts of its user interface with other view instances within a coach. Each view can contain one or more other views, which creates a parent-child relationship between the views. At run time, the parent view is rendered as a <div></div> tag that contains a nested <div></div> tag for each child view. Each view can also have a binding to a business object, CSS code to control its visual layout, and JavaScript to define its behavior.
A developer creates a coach that contains several views. At run time, the user sees the coach as a web page in a browser.
Toolkits for reusable views
To reuse views, you can create a library of common user interfaces and behavior called a toolkit. You can combine these common user interfaces to rapidly develop new coaches. The UI toolkit that is included in Business Automation Workflow provides a rich set of out-of-the-box views that you can use to create widget-style or composite-style views from scratch or by combining other controls. See UI toolkit. Other toolkits, such as the Responsive Coaches toolkit and the Coaches toolkit are deprecated.
Heritage coaches (deprecated)
Both client-side human services and heritage human services (deprecated) can have coaches. A heritage coach has the technology and architecture of a coach in IBM® BPM versions earlier than V8.0. To maintain compatibility with earlier coaches, Business Automation Workflow supports heritage coaches only in heritage human services.
Heritage coaches are deprecated artifacts that can be created only in the desktop Process Designer. In heritage human services that you bring in to the Process Designer, wherever possible, replace the deprecated heritage coaches with coaches. No conversion is available in the Process Designer for heritage coaches.
In the Process Designer, minimal support is available for basic editing of heritage coaches in XML view only. You can display heritage coaches alongside coaches in the Coaches view, but you can edit the XML heritage coach model only.
Restriction: Keep the following points in mind when you work with heritage coaches in the Process Designer:
  • Creation of heritage coaches is not supported. You can create heritage coaches in the desktop Process Designer only.
  • No graphic editor is available. No palette tools are available for creating or editing heritage coaches.
  • A solid understanding of XML is required to make significant changes to the XML heritage coach model. No validation is available as you perform the free-form editing of the XML code.
  • An invalid XML heritage coach model that you started with can cause your user interface rendering to fail at run time.
  • No activity type change is supported.
  • Cut and copy options are not supported.
  • The achieved heritage coach functionality is limited or different from that in the desktop Process Designer.