All About Stuff: webMethods Creating a business process with a task for approval Part 2 Create a Dummy Process to triggered by the PurchaseOrder submission

On this second part of webMethods BPM/Task Engine tutorial we are going to invoke the previously created web service to start a Process in webMethods with a simple Dummy task this will enable to progressively increment the level of complexity. Note that we are not going to explore BPM governance nor problem resolution this a tutorial for beginners that now they're way on IS but don't have experience on BPM.

1. Start by creating a new Process in Designer. If you don't have the Process view available in the top shortcut tabs hit the left most icon and look for Process Development.

Now you can select that view and on the left pane create a new Process Project by right clicking the Processes folder and clicking the new Process Project. Name you're process whatever you want but in real life it should have a designation related with the business unit the children processes will be related to.

After this the newly created Process Project folder can be used to create our process by second mouse button on it. This is a key component in process development organization, Processes Projects are our packages for Processes.

The final structure should look something like this.

2. Create a new process definition. If this is the first time you are creating a Process you might want to change from Business Analyst (blue) perspective to Process Developer (purple) otherwise you won't have access to the Implementation tab in the activities Properties tab.

Using the palette create a Process, I am using a pool with two lanes one will be for system and the second one for the Manager (at this time we are still not creating user tasks but this will be later assigned to a fictitious user). Also drag a start and end activity as well as an abstract class (that we are renaming to dummy at this time we just want to check the process has started and that we can monitor it on MWS).

The screen before is quite explicitly on the process design.

3. Enable the subscription of documents from the broker. To do this go to the Implementation tab and set Receive Protocol for Subscription(For Broker Documents), this will enable that any document type specified on the Receive Document parameter, whenever is published to the broker, it will immediately start a new process instance (of course there are filters that can be applied to fields on the received document).

4. Finally we need to build and upload the process, just click the icon on the picture bellow and everything is ok the process will be deployed to IS and also be visible on MWS.

This is how the Build Report should look.

5.Check that the process is upload in MWS and IS.

In the IS the BPM engine will generate a package. With a trigger for the transaction and one for the PurchaseOrder broker subscription. Yeap wM does all this background work to enable the BPM feature wMPRT is one of the packages responsible for this, this is a strong reload candidate whenever there is some anomalous BPM functionality.

On MWS when navigating to Administration > Business Processes the uploaded process should be available here, make sure the Execution is enabled.

If you are new to BPM I strongly advise to play around and create more complex processes, try to drag a service from the IS and see what happens, add more tasks and check how the IS package was changed.

6. Finally lets test if everything is working correctly. Using the same procedure as explained in part 1 run the SOAP UI (or other interface to call the WS). If things are working correctly you should be able to navigate (in MWS with Administrator account) to Monitoring > Business > Process Instances and see a BP instance available, you might have to hit search.