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Create a Process

Goal​

Add a process to your solution: the steps a piece of work goes through, who does each one, and in what order — an expense claim from submission to payment, a leave request, a customer complaint.

What a process is, and what it is not​

A process is drawn on swimlanes. Each lane is somebody — a role, a team, a system — and the nodes in that lane are the steps they are responsible for. That is the whole reason a process is drawn on lanes rather than as a flowchart: a flowchart says what happens, and a process has to say who.

It is not a form, a view, or a screen. Those say what a record looks like; a process says what happens to it, and by whom.

note

Drawing a process is not yet running one. A process runs once it is published, and then it starts from a button on a record's form, when a record is created or changed, or from Start a run in the designer. Saving changes nothing that is running.

Prerequisites​

  • You are signed in as a maker, with a solution and an environment selected.

Steps​

  1. Open your solution and choose Processes.
  2. Select New, and give it a display name — the logical name fills itself in.
  3. Write a description. Worth the thirty seconds: a process is usually opened by somebody who did not draw it, and the description is the only thing in the list that says what it is for.
  4. Select Save.
  5. With the new row selected, choose Design — see Design a Process. A process is created and then drawn, which is why this screen asks for a name rather than opening a canvas.

Naming​

The logical name is what everything else will refer to the process by. It carries your publisher's prefix (par_expense_approval), and it cannot be changed afterwards — the same rule a report's name and a saved query's name follow, for the same reason: renaming would break every reference at once and silently.

The display name is free to change whenever you like. It is what a maker reads.

Editing a process's name and description​

Select it and choose Edit. The drawer edits the process's identity only; the diagram is the canvas's, and is left exactly as it was — correcting a display name never costs you a drawing.

Deleting one​

Select it and choose Delete. Anything that starts the process by name stops working, so the confirmation says so; there is no undo.

Moving it between environments​

A process is a solution component, listed among the components that stand on their own rather than under a table — because a process is not about one table the way a report is. It may touch several, or none.

Add it to your solution from the solution's component list and it exports and imports with everything else, its drawing included: the design travels inside the process rather than beside it, so a solution cannot arrive with half of one.

Troubleshooting​

  • "'expense_approval' must be lower snake-case and start with the publisher prefix 'par_'." — type the part after the prefix; the screen supplies the prefix itself.
  • "A process named 'par_expense_approval' already exists in this environment." — the name is taken. Names are what other things refer to a process by, so two cannot share one.
  • "A display name is required." — the name a maker reads cannot be blank, even though the logical name is what the platform uses.
  • The process is not in the list after saving. — the list shows what the open solution contains. Check the solution picker at the top.