BPM OData Service for Starting BPM Processes

The BPM OData service allows you to easily implement a custom UI to start a BPM process. You use the BPM Process Start OData service (startprocess.svc) for this purpose.

Prerequisites

The following roles are assigned to you:

SAP_BPM_ODATA
SAP_BPM_TRIGGER_EVENT

For more information about BPM roles, see Authorizations and Roles.

Entities and Their Properties

A number of entities are used in the BPM Process Start OData service to start a process. The properties of the different entities are listed below.

Process Start Data

General information about a BPM process that is used by the BPM Process Start OData service is represented as a StartData entity. The entity stores identification information about a BPM process as well as the reference to the process start event. The BPM Process Start OData service, as well as SAP BPM, support processes with one start event only.

Property	Description
vendor	Vendor name of the development component where the process that is to be started is located (for example, "company.com")
dcName	Name of the development component where the process that is to be started is located (for example, "tc~test~dc")
processTechnicalName	Technical name of the process that is to be started
processInstanceId	Process instance identifier This property is empty by default. Once a process is started, the value of this property is populated with the identifier of the started process instance.
ProcessStartEvent	Navigation property for the process start event

Process Start Event

Information about a process start event is represented as a ProcessStartEvent entity. The entity is used as a wrapper around the entity representing the process start data itself. The name of the entity for the process start data and the entity properties are generated dynamically based on the XSD definition of the process start data that is defined at BPM process design time. For more information about XSD-to-EDM generation, see From XSD to the Entity Data Model.