Activity 3: Defining the Expense Report Object

Ordinarily, you may not handle the expense report data with a BPM object. You might, instead, use a pointer, perhaps an ID to access a record in a corporate database. Nevertheless, you will always handle at least some information within the BPM process. In this activity we do this by defining a BPM object.

Expense Report Data

To begin, 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.

This form contains three sections:

• A header, with basic information about the submission
• The items section, with the "contents" of the form
• 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 difficult to implement, we begin with the fixed fields. As a preparatory step, we list these fields along and the type of data each contains. Gathering this information now will help us later when we actually define the expense report object in Studio.

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

1. Creating a BPM Object
   In the Expense Management project, you store all the information about expense reports in a BPM object. You define this object in Oracle BPM Studio.
2. Defining BPM Object Attributes
   Once you have the BPM object, you need to specify the type of data to 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 calculates the value to be returned.
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 Process Variable
   You can store data about the instance in process variables. We will define a process variable of type ExpenseReport to store the expense report data in each instance.
7. Creating a Presentation
   In this tutorial, we have developed a simple process and a place to store the data traversing that process. When this data arrives in a participant's inbox, the participant must interact with it--updating it, perhaps, or simply reviewing it. To interact with the data, the participant needs an interface. In Oracle BPM, we develop such an interface either by creating a presentation or by using JSP pages.
8. Refining a Presentation
   In the previous step in this tutorial, we created a presentation for our Expense Report. In this step, we refine that presentation, determining how it will look and behave.
9. 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.
10. Designing a Screenflow
    You design a screenflow much as you do a process, by adding activities and defining their properties.
11. Running the Process
    You can now input data into the process in the Employee role.
12. 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.