Activity 3: Defining the Expense Report Object

Just about any process works on information of some kind. Here we will define a BPM object which will contain information about the expense report itself, as well as the state of the expense report in terms of the process.

In a real world process you may not necesarily handle the expense report data with a BPM object. Instead, you might use a pointer, such as an ID, to access a record in a corporate database.

That said, you will always handle a at least some information within the BPM process. Here we show you how to do this by defining a BPM object.

Expense Report Data

To begin, first examine the expense report form that follows:

Figure 1. A paper expense report form

This is a simple form for submitting an expense report. In a paper process, the employee would submit this form along with the receipts for the items listed in it.

You can think of this form as containing three sections: a header, with basic information about the submittal, the items section, with the "contents" of the form, and the footer (review section), which contains processing information not originally submitted.

Both header and footer contain simple fixed information fields, such as names, dates, a yes/no option, and so forth, while the items section contains a variable number of entries. Since the items section is a bit more complicated to implement, we will begin with the fixed fields. Our first step is to list these fields and the type of data they contain:

Field Name	Data Type
Submitted By	String
Submit Date	Date
Description	String
Cost Center	Integer
Total	Money
Reviewed By	String
Comments	String
Approved	Boolean

To keep track of what you are doing, you can print the expense report form shown. Use either the provided PDF version, or the Microsoft Word version.

1. Creating a BPM Object
   In the Expense Management project, you will store all the information about expense reports in a BPM object, which is a type of object you can define in ALBPM Studio to store data during the life of the instance.
2. Defining BPM Object Attributes
   Once you have the BPM object, you need to specify the type of data that will be stored in it. You do this by defining the attributes of the object. Each attribute holds one particular piece of information.
3. Defining a BPM Object Group
   In a BPM object, you implement arrays or collections of attributes by using groups. A group can contain one or more attributes.
4. Defining a Virtual Attribute
   A virtual attribute is not a stored data value like a regular attribute. Instead, when you access the value of a virtual attribute, code is that calculates the value to be returned. You will use a virtual attribute to implement the total amount of the expense report.
5. Defining a Valid Values List
   Often, a given piece of data may have a set of valid values much smaller than that allowed by the data type. For these cases, you can define a set of values that the user can select from.
6. Creating the Instance Variable
   You can store data about the instance in instance variables. We will define an instance variable of type ExpenseReport to store the expense report data in each instance.
7. Creating a Presentation
   You have the basic process, and you have a place to put the data. Now you must provide an interface where the participants of the process can input or review this data when it reaches their activity. In ALBPM, the two main ways of doing this are to create a presentation, or to use JSP pages.
8. Creating a Screenflow
   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.
9. Designing a Screenflow
   You design a screenflow in a manner similar to a process, by adding activities and defining their properties. There are no roles in a screenflow.
10. Running the Process
    You can now input data into the process in the Employee role.
11. Activity 3 Summary
    You have accomplished a great deal in this activity. Your process can now handle expense report data and has an interface to enter it, yet you have written almost no code.