Creating a business process definition (BPD)
To model a process, you must create a business process definition (BPD). A BPD is a reusable model of a process that defines the common aspects of all runtime instances of that process model.
Before you begin
To perform this task, you must be in the IBM® Process Designer desktop editor.
Ensure that you have access to a process application in the IBM Process Center repository.
About this task
Process modeling captures the ordered sequence of activities within a process along with supporting information from end to end. In process modeling, the business process is framed in a BPD to reflect the activities, the roles that conduct those activities, conditional branching, and the sequence of the workflow between the activities.
- When you create a BPD, use the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standards so that everyone who is involved with the process can interpret and understand the process model. BPMN also compacts your BPD by using symbols to represent ideas.
- Create BPDs in a process application, not in a toolkit:
- A BPD in a toolkit can result in process instances running inside the toolkit. A process instance running in a toolkit cannot be migrated.
- In Process Center, an exposed BPD or a service that is contained in a toolkit can be started from the toolkit or from the process application that contains the toolkit. But, in IBM Process Server, a BPD or a service can be started only from a process application.
A business process definition needs to include a lane for each system or group of users who participates in a process. A lane can be a participant lane or a system lane. However, you can create a BPD that groups the activities of a group and a system into a single lane if that is your preference.
You can designate any specific person or group to be responsible for the activities in a participant lane. Each lane that you create is assigned to the All Users group by default. You can use this default group for running and testing your BPD in the Inspector. The All Users group includes all users who are members of the tw_allusers security group, which is a special security group that automatically includes all users in the system.
A system lane contains activities handled by a specific Process Center system. Each activity needs an implementation, which defines the activity and sets the properties for the task. During implementation, a developer creates a service or writes the JavaScript necessary to complete the activities in a system lane.
For each BPD that you create, you need to declare variables to capture the business data that is passed from activity to activity in your process.
You can also add events to a BPD. Events in IBM BPM can be triggered by a due date passing, an exception, or a message arriving. The trigger that you want determines the type of event you choose to implement.
Procedure
- Open the Process Designer desktop editor.
- Open a process application in the Designer view.
- Click the plus sign next to Processes and select Business Process Definition from the list and complete the fields in the New Business Process Definition window.
- Design your process by dragging BPMN elements from the palette onto the diagram area.
- To specify the details for an element, select the element in the diagram and edit its properties in the Properties view.