Oracle Magazine - May/June 2011

In this example, if you were to check the value of the Salary column in HR’s Employees table for Employee 102, you would find that execution of the Apply Salary Raise process step updates the salary to 9700.

Figure 7: Approving the salary raise request

Figure 8: Viewing a completed process instance

Because the Web service is asynchronous, you will not receive a response. The test framework will report that the service has been invoked and will offer an option to open the message flow trace, an audit trail for the composite instance that is instantiated by invocation of the service exposed by SalaryRaiseApprovalProcess. It should show that the first HRDataService invocation—the implementation of the GatherEmployeeFile process activity—has successfully completed. The DecideOnSalaryRaise human workflow component should be running, indicating that a task has been assigned but not completed.

Business analysts and operational managers can monitor the progress of business processes by using the Business Process Workspace application, typically available at http://{hostname}:{port}/bpm/ workspace/.

In the running process just started,
the Decide on Salary Raise task has been

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completed project for this article

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created and assigned to the HRManager group. Because the Oracle WebLogic Server user is a member of that group, he can act on this task. The Actions menu for this task includes the two final outcome values of the task: Approve and Reject. Figure 7 shows the case in which the user decides to approve the salary raise request.

After processing the approval, the Business Process Workspace application informs the user that it has successfully processed the action. The task then disappears from the My Tasks list for the Oracle WebLogic Server user, because the task is now complete.

The Business Process Workspace application also provides insight into completed process instances. On the Process Tracking tab, the Oracle WebLogic Server user can find the instance of SalaryRaiseApprovalProcess he just participated in.

Figure 8 provides a visual overview of a completed process instance. The Process Tracking view clearly shows which conditional path each completed instance took, and it indicates the current status of all currently executing process instances.

BUSINESS-PROCESS-ORIENTED
ARCHITECTURE

This article has shown that the business-oriented way of describing a process in Oracle BPM Studio works hand in glove with the more technical approach used by Oracle SOA Suite. Together, these tools helped you deliver a running SalaryRaiseApprovalProcess without coding and—more importantly—with a business process focus from start to finish. The process can be triggered, executed, and monitored from browser-based Web interfaces. Another browser-based application called BPM Composer (accessible at http:// {hostname}:{port}/bpm/composer) can provide insight into BPM process definitions and enable business analysts to document and edit these definitions online.

Oracle Unified BPM Suite 11 g enables organizations to rethink the way IT supports the business, by focusing on modeling business processes that span roles, departments, and enterprise resources. Analyzing and modeling these processes with BPMN can lead to a seamless implementation of process activities through services and human tasks. Execution of process instances is centrally coordinated and monitored—allowing for real-time insight into exceptions and bottlenecks as well as on-the-fly intervention and adjustments within the process flow. 

Lucas Jellema is an Oracle ACE director and CTO at AMIS, an Oracle and Java specialist based in the Netherlands. He is the author of the Oracle SOA Suite 11g Handbook (Oracle Press, 2010). He frequently writes at technology.amis.nl/blog.