Scenario: Order Office Material 

Purpose

The Order Office Material process demonstrates how you can use Guided Procedures (GP) to implement a real-life business scenario as a strictly defined repeatable workflow offering user guidance in its execution.

By implementing this process, you will become familiar with the following GP functions and features:

·        Modeling a process and creating a process template in GP design time

·        Creating and using different block types, such as sequential, alternatives, and post-conditional loop

·        Creating actions and defining targets for action result states

·        Consolidating parameters at block and process level

·        Managing security-related aspects in process modeling, such as consolidating process roles

·        Providing additional information for the process steps by means of callable info objects

·        Creating different types of callable objects, such as WebDynpro callable objects, decision dialogs with two or more result states, background callable objects, and content packages

·        Implementing custom WebDynpro callable objects using GP public APIs

The process and its components are available in the gallery after the GP installation.

Prerequisites

To be able to implement the overall process, you must meet the following requirements:

Technical requirements	Usage types: ... ·        Enterprise Portal (EP) ·        Development Infrastructure (DI)
Development components	For the implementation of custom WebDynpro components, the following GP development component must be imported in the NWDI that you use: ·        caf/eu/gp/api/wd
Authorizations, roles	·        To deploy WebDynpro components, you must hold administrator permissions for the Application Server (AS) Java. ·        To create objects in the Guided Procedures design time, you must hold the GP Business Expert and the GP Expert User portal roles. ·        To work with the Guided Procedures runtime, you must hold the GP User portal role.
Knowledge requirements	·        WebDynpro – familiarity with the WebDynpro technology is required for the implementation of custom callable objects, including familiarity with Web Dynpro development tools in the SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio ·        SAP NetWeaver Development Infrastructure – you must know how to work with the NWDI, for example, how to create development components and define dependencies ·        Guided Procedures design time and runtime – this documentation assumes that you have already got started with Guided Procedures using the My First Process tutorial.

 

Process Flow

The following graphic presents the main components that comprise the Order Office Material process.

The process contains the following elements:

       1.      First, the purchaser decides whether he or she would like to see a list of office material items available, or whether he or she will  order items directly using their order number.

This part of the process is implemented as an Alternatives type  block (Order Office Material), and uses a decision action (Decision List or Order Number).

       2.      If the purchaser has chosen to see the list of items, he or she goes to step Display List and Select, where the user can see all available items, and select one or more of them. At this point, the purchaser can also review a catalog, which includes images and descriptions of the available items.

When the purchaser has selected the required items to order, he or she chooses Order Items. In the Decision Order Another Item step, the user can decide if he or she would like to go back and select more items to order, or continue to the next step in the process.

This part of the process is implemented as a post-conditional loop type block (Display List and Select Loop). It uses a decision action appropriate for loops (Decision Order Another Item). The item catalog is implemented as a content package (E-Catalog), which is added to the action as a callable info object.

       3.      When the purchaser completes the order list, and chooses to continue ordering the items, the order list is displayed in the Display Selected Items step. At this point, the purchaser can remove items, confirm his or her choice, or cancel the further execution of the process.

       4.      If the purchaser chooses to continue ordering the items, he or she goes to the next step in the process, where items are actually ordered by their order number.

The purchaser can go to this step directly at the beginning of the process, if he or she chooses to order items by order number in the first step.

The order is sent to another user for approval, and if it is approved, the purchaser receives an order confirmation e-mail.

The last part of the process is implemented as a sequential block (Order with Order Number), which comprises three actions.

The implementation of the process building elements is described in detail in the following sections:

·        WebDynpro Component Implementation

·        Defining Fine-Grained Process Components

·        Defining Blocks

·        Process Definition: Putting It All Together

The chosen modeling approach is bottom-up – that is, the most fine-grained components are created first, and are used in the higher-level components.