The Big Picture Of BPA Scripts

Fastpath: Refer to The Big Picture Of Scripts to better understand the basic concept of scripts.

Users may require instructions in order to perform certain tasks. You may set up scripts that step a user through your business processes. For example, you might want to create scripts to help users do the following:

  • Add a new person to an existing account
  • Set up a customer to pay automatically
  • Modify a customer who no longer wants to receive marketing information
  • Modify a customer's web password
  • Record a trouble order
  • Merge two accounts into one account
  • Fix a bill with an invalid rate

Users execute these business processes by initiating BPA scripts (BPA). Users can also define their favorite BPA scripts in their user preferences.

BPA scripts may be designed by either of the following approaches:
  • Self-contained and standalone flows. With this approach, the script is executed as an independent flow that cannot interact with the current application pages. Every step in these flows is contained within the script itself, including prompting for additional information from the user and performing server functions etc.
  • Guiding flows that surf on top of one or more application pages and interact with these pages in parallel to script execution.
    CAUTION: This approach is considered legacy functionality and as such limited to fixed pages. It does not work with portal pages. With portals being the product's modern user interface technology, the overall support for this type of BPA scripts is planned to be deprecated in a future release.
    CAUTION: Future upgrade issues. There may be times when fixed pages are changed or converted to portals to leverage modern user experience capabilities. Such changes made by the base-package will necessitate a redesign of these guided flows. Please refer to the release notes for such changes.

The topics in this section describe background topics relevant to BPA scripts.