Posts

Flows for APEX: Creating Loops or Circular Flows in Your Process

Image
  It often feels like we are going round in loops at work!  We submit a piece of work for approval -- and it comes back for re-work, before it can be submitted again.  That IS part of the process.  So how do we model that in BPMN, and what are the issues in implementing this in Flows for APEX? Let's take the example of getting a purchase order approved.  It's tempting to produce a simple process model where everything just gets approved.  The happy case... Simple expense approval process But then what happens if the claim gets rejected?  Usually this means that the employee needs to edit the details, or provide more receipts, or somehow change the submitted document.  So our first diagram doesn't model the real process. Our Expense Claim now with a Edit Loop We would expect that when the employee gets notification that his claim has been rejected, he will edit his claim and resubmit it.  So we can add a sequence flow arrow from the 'notify em...

Flows for APEX - Changing Colours on the BPMN Viewer APEX Plug-In

Image
** NOTE - THIS APPLIES TO FLOWS FOR APEX V5.  UR IMPLEMENTATION CHANGED IN v21.1 *** The Flows for APEX BPMN Process Viewer is an APEX Plug-in that allows you to display a BPMN process, and also show on the process the current progress through that application.  We ship it in Page 10 of the Flows for APEX application -- which is a flow design and monitoring application.  We think that many applications that you develop using Flows for APEX will include this, possibly in a modal pop-up, to show users where they are in a process. So a process might display something like this: The Flows for APEX engine keep track of which process steps have been completed, which are current tasks, and which is the last completed task on each subflow.  These are used by the BPMN Viewer to show  process progress on the Viewer. Out of the box, and as shown in the screen shot above, the BPMN viewer shows progress as follows: current tasks are shown in green last tasks completed on eac...