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.

Presentations can be built quickly by Studio, while JSP pages can have a look and feel precisely defined by developers. Even if the process you are developing will use JSP when deployed, presentations are useful during process development.

In this step, we create a presentation for the user who submits the expense report. This presentation will be based on the ExpenseReport BPM object. To create this presentation, follow these steps:

In the Project Navigator, right-click the ExpenseReport BPM object (), and click New > Presentation (). The Presentation Wizard appears.
Enter SubmitReport in the Presentation field.
Select the From Template checkbox. Do not select the BPM Preferences checkbox.
Click Next. The Presentation Referenced Attributes dialog appears. It enables you to select the attributes that will be shown as fields in the presentation.

Select the attributes shown in the table below, in the order shown.

submittedBy

submitDate

description

costCenter

items[].description

items[].date

items[].amount

total

comments

You control this order either by adding each attribute in the desired sequence, or by selecting an attribute in the list and using the Up and Down buttons to place it in the proper position.

The fields are placed in the presentation following the order of the attribute list.

Click Finish. The SubmitReport presentation is created, and a presentation editor is opened with it.
The presentation editor includes the Design Elements toolbox. To dock the toolbox on the right side, click the Dock Right icon (). To dock it on the left side, click the Dock Left icon ().

Now that we have created the presentation, we must now specify how it should look and behave. The next step shows how to do this.