Most ALBPM processes include one or more interactive activities, meaning activities which are carried out by people who are participants in the process. For people to interact with an activity, you will need to build a user interface.
End users interact with ALBPM through a Web application. This can either be the WorkSpace application which is part of the BPM suite, or a custom application that interfaces to the process execution engine through the Process API, or PAPI.
This section covers development using WorkSpace. PAPI-based development is covered separately.
End-users interact with an ALBPM process through the WorkSpace, which is a web application. Hence, participants interact with web pages that can contain a form to complete or data for the participant to work with. See WorkSpace documentation.
In WorkSpace, you can create a user interface for a given form or data display by creating an ALBPM presentation or by writing a JSP page.
Both methods are used to create a web page or form which the participant will use to interact with the data. Presentations can be built quickly in Studio using the Presentation Wizard, while JSP pages can implement functionality and have a look and feel precisely defined by developers. Even if the process you are developing will be deployed with JSP pages, you can use presentations to have something working quickly.
In order to build a presentation, you need a BPM Object with attributes. In effect, a presentation is actually a UI layer built on top of the data model of the object. Hence, your first step will be to define the BPM Object and its data model. See BPM Objects for a detailed description.
A presentation is actually an element of the BPM Object, and a single BPM Object can have more than one presentation. You can define several presentations to the same BPM Object when you do not want to show every attribute to every participant. Also, in a presentation you can set whether an attribute field can be edited or is read-only. Therefore, two presentations on the same object could show identical data, but the fields available for editing will be different, as they would be intended for different participants.
Presentations can be used directly from the process, but normally they are used by screenflows, which are a specialized kind of process for user interaction sequences. Screenflows are in turn called from the main process. See What is a Screenflow?