Steps for Developing Workflow Applications

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.