About Flow
rules
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A flow rule defines a business process or part of a business process. A flow rule governs how work objects are created, progress through the system, and become resolved. A flow rule consists of a network of shapes and connectors (lines), each with associated parameters and values.
Flows are the fundamental rules that represent business processes. They determine who works on a work object in what sequence, what decisions and processing occur automatically, and other aspects of the business process.
After you complete and save the flow form, click the Run
toolbar button (
) to create a new work object with the flow. (The
Run toolbar button is visible only for starter flows —
flows with Creates a new work object? selected on the
Process tab.)
Use the Process tab to constrain which users can execute this flow. Use the Parameters tab to identify flow parameters to be supplied when a flow execution starts. Use the Diagram tab to explore a flow rule interactively and preview the rules it references, including the runtime appearance of work object forms.
Click the Flow Editor toolbar button (
) to start Microsoft Visio
2002/2003 and edit the flow. If Visio presents a warning about
macros, choose Yes. (Visio 2007 is supported only
in 2003 compatibility mode.)
Click the Return button (
) when you complete Visio
editing.
To change the shape properties of an existing shape, but not alter the structure and relationships among shapes, access the Design tab, right-click a shape, and select the Edit tab.
As a best
practice, ensure that everyone in your development team is
using a common version of Visio. Process
Commander operates identically whether you use Visio 2002 or
Visio 2003 (also called Visio XP). However, you save a flow
rule edited with Visio 2003, that rule cannot later be edited
using Visio 2002.
Flow rules
containing too many shapes can introduce complex,
difficult-to-debug processing into your application. As a best
practice, SmartBuild guardrails recommend limiting a flow rule
to contain 15 or fewer shapes, not counting Notify and Router
shapes. If your flow grows to contain more than 15 shapes,
revise the flow to call or branch to subflows to handle
continuations, special cases, or non-mainstream processing.
These topics describe aspects of flow editing:
After you complete initial development and testing, you can delegate selected flow rules to line business managers. The Diagram tab of the Flow form provides managers with access to the fields most often updated.
For each flow rule in your application, consider which
business changes might require rule updates, and whether to
delegate the rule to non-developers who then can make such
updates directly. See How to build for
change.
Use the Application Explorer or Process slice (
) to access the flow
rules that apply to the work types in your current work pool.
Use the Rules by Type Explorer to list all the flow rules
available to you.
Defining a flow
rule that creates new work objects does not automatically make
the new flow rule available from the portal. For step-by-step
instructions, see How to create a flow
and make it available.
Flow rules are part of the Process category. A flow rule is an instance of the Rule-Obj-Flow rule type.
Flow rules are normally stored in the PegaRULES database as
rows of the pr4_rule_flow table.
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