Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide > For Developers: Basics of Building Workflow Processes >

Overview of Developing a Workflow Process

You use Siebel Tools to create workflows. In a typical development cycle for creating workflows, your steps take the following sequence:

1. Review existing process definitions. See Reviewing Existing Process Definitions.
2. Use the Siebel Tools client to develop new workflow processes. See Using Process Designer in Siebel Tools.
3. Save the workflow processes to your local database.
4. Test the workflow processes using the Siebel Web Client. See For Developers: Testing Workflow Processes.
5. Debug the workflow processes using your local master or test database.

   NOTE:  Long-running workflow processes cannot be debugged using the Process Simulator. For testing of long-running workflow processes, see Testing Workflows That Involve Server Components.

   Workflow definitions are checked out from the repository into the local database, where they are modified and debugged locally before being checked in to the master repository.

   NOTE:  Debugging against a server or test database, instead of debugging locally, allows the workflow engine to access server components such as the Server Request Broker.

6. Run the workflow processes from the Siebel Web Client, using your local master or test database.
7. Using the Siebel Tools client:
   • Check the workflow processes into and out of your master database.
   • Export the workflow processes into an XML file for backup.
   • Import the workflow processes from the XML file to restore them (if necessary). See Importing or Exporting a Process Definition.
8. Deploy the workflow process definitions from your master database to your staging or production database. See Deploying Workflow Processes.

This development-cycle sequence is illustrated in Figure 6.

Figure 6.  Typical sequence for developing workflows