13 articles about Process design, in reading order.
Process design
A business process in Parsware is drawn, not coded. Lanes for who does the work, shapes for the steps, arrows for the order. We opened the leave-approval sample and went round the designer: the palette, the outline, the canvas, the properties panel, and the problems panel that checks the process as you draw.
Process design
A swimlane named Manager tells a reader who does the work. It tells the engine nothing until you give the lane a Role, picked from the environment's security roles. We set one on the leave-approval sample, added a lane, and followed a role from the designer to the people who hold it.
Process design
Four shapes carry most processes: a start, tasks, a branch where the process decides, and a finish. We opened the two-step approval sample and clicked each one to see what it asks for and where it can connect, and found the designer letting a connection leave a Finish without a word. It says so now.
Process design
A task's Type puts a small badge on the step: user, service, script, manual, send, receive, business rule. Only one of them changes what a run does. We went through the list on the two-step approval sample, and say plainly what each type does and what it only describes.
Process design
A purchase order needs Finance and Legal to sign off, and neither should wait for the other. A Fork sends it to both at once, and a Join waits until they have both answered. We opened the parallel sign-off sample, and fixed three things on the way: unreadable labels, stray resize handles, and a Join whose most useful setting had no control.
Process design
You drag from one step to another to connect them, the designer draws the corners, and View → Auto arrange tidies the whole diagram without moving work between lanes. Trying it for this article found four things to fix: two kinds of overlapping lines, a drag that drew nothing, and a hint that was always in English.
Process design
A branch doesn't decide anything by itself. Each connection leaving it carries a condition, one line of BS that is true or false, and the run takes the one that's true. We read the conditions on the Leave Approval sample, tried to break them three ways, and fixed two things on the way.
Process design
Every step in a process can run code at the moments that matter to it: when the run arrives, when the task is given to someone, when they finish it, when the run leaves. A user task also works out who gets it and which record they look at. We opened the manager's step in the Leave Approval sample and went through all six.
Process design
A user task has to land in somebody's list. It goes to whoever its Assigned to answers, or failing that whoever holds its lane's role in the run's unit, and a step can refuse the person who started the run. We went through each on the Leave Approval sample, and found the help page telling people to write something that doesn't work.
Process design
A process carries values from one step to the next: what the manager decided, how many days were asked for. Each is a variable, declared once on the process with a name and a type, given a first value in On start, and read and written by name. We added one to the Leave Approval sample and misspelt another on purpose.
Process design
The process designer checks the drawing as you draw it, and the corner of the canvas says what is still missing: a step nothing reaches, a step that leads nowhere, a timer that never fires, a misspelt variable. Selecting a line takes you to the thing it is about. Nothing stops you saving, but Publish now waits for the list to be empty.
Process design
When a process step reaches a person, they read what it opens and then decide. A coform is what they decide on: a few fields and the buttons that end the step. We built one in the parallel sign-off sample, put it on a task, and routed each button its own way. The field types now read as words.
Process design
A process design is a plain JSON file you can export, edit and import, and the import checks it before anything reaches the canvas. Export a picture, PNG or SVG, for a document or a slide. Trying both, we fixed two things: the pictures now carry the lane names, and a refused file names the missing node.
