Creating a Screenflow

You can design a process to call presentations directly, but normally you call them from a screenflow that is, in turn called from the business process. A screenflow is a special type of process that defines user interaction sequences.

You can create a screenflow in different ways. Here we create the screenflow directly from the activity that calls it.

To create a screenflow:

  1. In the Project Navigator, expand Processes, then click Expense Report. The process design editor displays the notation for the Expense Report
  2. In the process design editor , right-click on the Create Expense Report activity, and click Main Task from the context menu. The Main Task dialog box appears.
  3. From the Implementation Type list, select Screenflow from the drop-down list.
  4. In the Related Screenflow section, click New. The Screenflow Information dialog appears.
  5. In the Name field, enter Submit Report, and click Next. The Select Instance Variables dialog appears.
  6. Set the reportArg variable as follows:
    In Out
    No No

    Leave all others as No.

  7. Click Next. The Screenflow out - Process in Argument Mapping dialog appears.
  8. Verify that this page has no entries, and click Next. The message "Screenflow created successfully" appears.
  9. Click Finish. The Screenflow out - Process in Argument Mapping dialog closes and you are prompted to specify the location of the screenflow in the Project Navigator
  10. Click OK to accept the default location shown, under Processes .
  11. Click OK in the Main Task dialog box. The dialog box closes and an editor opens with the Submit Report screenflow diagram. The Begin and End activities are automatically displayed, just as when a new process is created.
  12. In the Project Navigator, expand Processes and click Expense Report. The process notation appears in the design editor. In the Variables window, in theInstance section, add a process variable named reportSf, of type ExpenseReport. You can do this by following steps 2 to 7 of the Creating the Process Variable activity.

    This process variable holds an ExpenseReport object during the life of the screenflow. We added the Sf suffix to make it easier to identify as a screenflow process variable. This suffix is not an Oracle BPM convention and is not required.

  13. Right-click on the reportSf process variable and click Map as process incoming argument (Map as Incoming Argument icon 
				). The Argument Mapping dialog appears. It shows that, in the Begin activity, the reportSf instance variable receives the value of the incoming argument reportSfArg (hence this is the BeginIn mapping).
  14. Click OK in the Argument Mapping dialog box, and then right-click again on the reportSf process variable and click Map as process outgoing argument (Map as Outgoing Argument icon 
				). The Argument Mapping dialog box appears again. This time it shows that at the End activity, the outgoing argument reportSfArg is assigned the value of the reportSf screenflow process variable (hence this is the EndOut mapping).
  15. Click OK to close the Argument Mapping dialog, and save your changes.

You have now created the Submit Report screenflow, and set this screenflow as the main task of the Create Expense Report activity. You have defined the process variable for the screenflow (reportSf), and you have mapped the inbound and outbound arguments of the screenflow to it. You can check this at any time by right-clicking on the Begin or End activities and clicking on Argument Mapping.

You still need to design the screenflow, and will do this in the next task.