Guided Procedures Architecture Overview 

Purpose

Guided Procedures (GP) provides tools and framework for modeling and executing user-centric workflows. It is aimed to support business specialists in implementing processes, and to guide casual end users through the execution of these processes, helping them to understand their work context better and to contribute more effectively.

Integration

The following figure shows how GP integrates into the SAP NetWeaver, and leverages legacy and third-party systems to build a user-centric working environment.

Guided Procedures: Technical System Landscape

Features

The goals of the GP framework are:

·        to provide an environment for easier implementation of model-driven workflows

·        to enable integration of different applications

·        to implement transport and internationalization capabilities for GP content

To meet these goals, GP provides a design time, and a runtime, as shown in the figure below.

Guided Procedures: Programming Model

Design Time

This is the environment where you model process templates and their building elements.

The Web-based design time tools are accessed from the design-time workset.

More information: Process Modeling.

All objects that you create are available in a central repository called gallery. The object metadata is stored in the database schema of the underlying Java server. Object versioning is supported.

The integration of various application types in workflows modeled with GP is enabled using callable objects.

More information: Callable Object

GP content can be exported to a deployable unit and transported across systems, either using Java-side deployment, or the transport capabilities in the ABAP stack.

Runtime

Once activated, process templates can be instantiated and executed in the GP runtime. The runtime user interface provides different views on the process, such as overview, detailed activities view, and so on.

GP comes with an embedded implementation of the GP Workflow Engine, which enables you to execute processes without additional configuration of the processing layer. Workflow processing is executed entirely in the Java stack, and the process context information is stored in the Java server database.