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.

1. In the Project Navigator, within the ExpenseManagement project, expand Catalog (). You will see a list of catalog modules. If you are working on a fresh Studio installation, these will be Fuego, Java, and Plumtree.
2. You will add your own module, called ExpenseComponents. Right-click on Catalog and click New > Module (). The Module dialog box appears.
3. Enter ExpenseComponents in the Module Name field, and click OK. The ExpenseComponents module is added to the catalog.
4. Right-click on the ExpenseComponents module icon and click New > BPM Object (). The BPM Object dialog box appears.
5. Enter ExpenseReport in the Name field, and click OK. The ExpenseReport BPM object is added to the ExpenseComponents module.
6. Expand the ExpenseComponents module and then expand the ExpenseReport BPM object. You will see the contents of the ExpenseReport object. It contains one method, also called ExpenseReport. This is the constructor method, which means that it will execute whenever an Expense Report object is created (or "constructed"). If you need to include code that will initialize something in the BPM object, you can add it to this method.

Your project now contains a catalog module and a BPM object within it. In the Project Navigator, you should see the following:

Figure 1. ExpenseReport BPM Object in ExpenseComponents module

In the next task, you will add attributes to this object. These will contain expense report data.