Understanding Workflow Application Development

Rules determine which activities are required to process your business data. For example, you might implement a rule that says department managers must approve all requests for external classes.

You implement rules through workflow events, such as PeopleCode that evaluates a condition and triggers a notification (a routing) when appropriate.

Roles describe how people fit into the workflow. A role is a class of users who perform the same type of work, such as clerks or managers. Your business rules typically specify which roles do which activities. For example, a rule can say that department managers (a role) must approve external course requests.

Roles direct the work to types of people rather than to individuals. Identifying roles instead of individual users makes a workflow more flexible and easier to maintain. Associating roles with users makes it easy to ensure workflow users the security access that they need to access the pages where they complete their work.

Roles remain stable, even as people change jobs. For example, if an employee in the Research and Development (R&D) department requests an external class, the system forwards the request to R&D Manager, not to Vic Rumpel, who is the current R&D manager. PeopleSoft application data serves as the basis for defining roles throughout your organization.

Routings specify where the information goes and what form it takes: e-mail message or worklist entry. Routings make it possible to deploy applications throughout the enterprise. They work through the levels and departments of an enterprise to bring together all of the roles that are necessary to complete complex tasks.

Workflow development progresses through eight steps:

1. Design the workflow application.

   Before you start developing workflow applications, analyze the business processes that you want to automate. Identify the goal of each business process, what its component tasks are, and how the tasks should be divided into smaller activities and steps. Articulate the conditions that trigger a workflow event and what happens when those conditions occur. Understand who your workflow users are and how you’ll determine who receives a work item.

   As you design the workflow application, identify the workflow rules and how they relate to the data objects and transactions in the PeopleSoft system.

2. Build the underlying application.

3. Create workflow maps.

   Use PeopleSoft Application Designer to create graphical maps that represent your business process. At this stage, you create maps only for the processes that are involved in the underlying application; you add PeopleSoft Workflow-specific elements to the maps when you define events and routings.

4. Define roles and users.

   Define users’ roles when you give them their user IDs. Roles are important in PeopleSoft Workflow. To ensure that work flows to the correct person, you must determine who that person is. You can find the right person using either query roles or user list roles.

5. Create a worklist record.

   The worklist record determines which fields of information the system stores for each work item, including the data needed to access the target page (the search keys for the page) and any additional information that you want to display in the worklist itself. Because different worklist entries can have different target pages and display data, you need separate worklist records for the different types of entries that will appear in the worklist.

6. Define workflow objects.

   Events and routings are both objects on the workflow maps. To define these workflow objects, add the icons to the map, linked to the step representing the page where the triggering event occurs.

7. Define event triggers.

   After you create workflow processes, link them into the PeopleSoft applications by adding PeopleCode programs to the pages. The PeopleCode detects when a business rule has been triggered and determines the appropriate action.

8. Test.

   No development is complete until the workflow is thoroughly tested. Be sure to test under a variety of conditions, both usual and unusual.