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Purpose
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.
Shapes and Visio editing
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, 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:
Delegation
C-494 KHATV 10/22/03 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.
Access
Additional development steps
Category and database table
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.
Process
category
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