Concepts

There are many scenarios in which the usage of a process engine as a component inside the orchestration layer makes a lot of sense. Depending on the scenario the resulting architecture of your application may vary. The following section explains the core concepts and building blocks of the architecture we want to support and address by the Polyflow libraries.

The 10,000 feet view

The two main building blocks of the solution are Process Application and Process Platform. Sometimes you unite them inside the same deployment unit, but we differentiate them to make their responsibilities more clear.

A Process Application implements the main business logic of the solution. It integrates the process engine that is responsible for execution the processes and orchestrates the business functions. During this execution user tasks are created and performed by the user and the business data objects are modified. For this purpose, the process application provides user interfaces for user tasks and business data operations.

A Process Platform serves as an integration point of one or multiple process applications. It might integrate with a company's Single Sign-On (SSO) solution and Identity & Authorization Management, be part of Intranet portal solution. It provides process agnostic user task list and business object list.

Task-oriented applications

The core concept of a task-oriented solution is to model the underlying business process and to split the user interaction into parts represented by the user tasks. Every user task is an abstraction of an operation needed to be performed by the user of the system. Usually, they include some sort of call-to-action including the input fields to be able to input user's decision. Examples of user tasks are Confirm Order, Verify Quotation, Validate Document.

User experience plays a significant role in acceptance of the overall solution. In order to access the user task a special UI, called user task form is used. Every user task form is presenting only that limited part of the overall information to the user which is required to complete the user task. This limitation is important in order to avoid distraction and foster focus on the user task.

Since there might be multiple process instances running concurrently, a user might see multiple user tasks in the same time. A special view listing all user tasks available for a user is called task list. The application of different user task assignment strategies may be useful to get optimal processing.

Along with user tasks forms, representing the actual work the user has to complete, a data-oriented view on business processes is a common requirement. It concentrates on the data being processed and display the business data entities involved in the business processes (sometimes called Workpieces). Depending on your application, business data entities might be created before the running through business processes and usually the lifecycle of them spans over the business process execution. Examples of business data entities are Order, Shipment or Document. In order to display the state of an individual business data entity a special Business Data Form is designed.

And since there are multiple of them in the overall application, a special view to search and list them, a so-called Business Entry List or Workpieces List is developed. Sometimes you are interested in business data entries in a particular processing status and develop a special view for them, for example: Current Workpiece List or Archive List.