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Phase 4: Process Design

The flow of business data in your enterprise can be captured by business processes. This section starts with an overview. It then briefly discusses the activities used in the example scenario. See Phase 4: Business Process Design (Chapter 6) for more information.

Overview

The TIBCO Designer GUI supports defining business processes with these major elements:

•	Each process has a starting and ending point.

•	Activities are added to the process. Activities can access data from an adapter service, manipulate the data, and send the data elsewhere. Examples include sending email, querying a database, or adding content to a file.

•	The process can choose from different execution paths depending on certain criteria. For example, if the amount of a purchase order exceeds a certain number, you could add an additional credit check.

•	Activities can be grouped. Grouping allows you to create loops. These loops can be used, for example, to have one error condition for the group, or to group activities as transactions that commit to a database only when all activities in the group are completed.

•	Most processes have one main process, which starts with a process starter activity. Different activities, for example, a SOAP Event Source activity or a Receive Mail activity can function as process starters. A process can call different subprocesses as it executes.

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If the business process requires user interaction, for example, approval of certain orders, it is possible to use the activities in the Manual Work palette. Manual Activities interact with TIBCO InConcert and allow a pool of users to accept outstanding tasks. For additional information, see the TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks Palette Reference.

An integral part of process design must be testing. TIBCO Designer includes a test mode that allows you to run any of the processes in your project at design time. You can set breakpoints and provide required input as needed. You can also see the values of variables as they are passed through the different activities in the process.

Activities Used by the Example

The example includes all the services (see Services Used by the Example). In addition

•	A Send Mail activity sends an email to the customer if shipping the order is delayed.

•	A Manual Work activity handles the credit check approval.

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