Learn More about the Components in an Application
As a developer, it’s your job to design and create applications that handle a business process. These applications are made up of components—such as processes, forms, decisions, and documents—that define how the application works.
Processes
A business process refers to tasks or activities that result in a well-defined outcome. You can create two types of processes and use both types in a process application:
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Structured processes follow a sequential and predictable path. Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) elements within the process define the flow and behavior of the application.
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Dynamic processes automate unpredictable processes that require expert knowledge or changing circumstances.
For most processes, you’ll create and edit human tasks. You can configure their duration and deadline, customize the presentation, and add participants and routing. You can also assign users and roles to a human task.
For developing a structured process, here are the topics you’ll be most interested in:
For developing a dynamic process, here are the topics you’ll be most interested in:
Forms
Forms define the interface that your application users see during runtime. Think of it as the user interface for a human task or a start form event that starts an application.
You can create forms from the ground up or you can base them on an existing data structure. You can also add controls to a form, and customize the layout of a form.
Within a form, you can define the behavior of a form, such as showing or hiding certain form controls based on the state of other form controls.
Processes provides the web form editor for creating and editing forms and their behavior. Here are the topics you’ll be most interested in:
Business Types
Business types represent real-world concepts or objects, such as a ticket, a request, or an employee. You use business types to create the data structures required in your business application.
Defining how data is stored and manipulated is part of the design and development of an application. You can define complex data types, create data objects, define the expressions used to manipulate the data, define data associations, and define the input and output for your processes.
Decisions
Decisions are containers for if-then rules and decision tables that use the same input and output data objects. A decision exposes these data objects as a reusable service that multiple business processes can invoke. For example, a decision table can determine whether a manager must approve a travel request based on the travel amount, city, and purpose. See Create Decisions.
Integrations
Integrations define how a business process connects to other processes, systems, integrations, REST services, and web services.
You can create connections to integrations, and exposed REST and web services. Your applications can then communicate and exchange data with these services.
Documents
You can create folders to organize and store documents in Oracle Content Management. These documents can then be used at Process runtime. You can restrict access to only those folders that are relevant to the objectives of the tasks.
You can also define a document or folder that will be used to start a process. For example, home buyers submitting a loan application starts a mortgage process or job applicants submitting a résumé starts the hiring process.
See Integrate Documents.
Indicators
Business indicators enable you to capture and display metrics specific to your process.
You can select data objects as business indicators to capture business metrics, and then display process metrics in custom dashboards.