What this book covers
Chapter 1, Flow Control Patterns, covers the basic flow control patterns in BPMN. This chapter offers an exemplary and comprehensive exposure to flow control patterns that are helpful in modeling and implementing BPMN solutions. During the course of modeling from "As-Is" to "To-Be" process, a process analyst models, designs, drafts, and publishes a sequence of activities and their flow control. This chapter starts off by showcasing the essentials of flow control patterns. This chapter explains converging from conditional and unconditional sequence flow to simple and parallel split and merge; later, the flow in this chapter expands to multi merge and transitioning patterns. Then, there is a comprehensive guide to patterns such as the partial join and discriminator patterns.
Chapter 2, Multi-instance and State-based Patterns, discusses a set of patterns that will demonstrate how processes can handle batch jobs and simultaneously spawn multiple work item instances in a process. This chapter simplifies the usage of loop characteristics while showcasing multi-instance perspectives. This chapter emphasizes on developing solutions for use cases with multi-instance requirements with design time and run time knowledge. This chapter further covers iteration patterns by demonstrating structured loop and unstructured looping mechanism. Then, implicit and explicit termination patterns will showcase the termination pattern.
Chapter 3, Invocation Patterns, gives an insight into the various discrete mechanisms to initiate processes and this chapter covers various patterns that illustrate these discrete invocation patterns. Process interfacing offers other processes, services, and external systems to communicate with BPM processes. This chapter uncovers process interfacing with queues, services, and processes by exposing different operations which external systems can interact with.
Chapter 4, Human Task Patterns, discusses the patterns and features that offer formalized best practices and solutions for the commonly occurring issues and challenges that allow process analysts, developers, and designers to build solutions to bring in human intuition in the process. This chapter discusses various task flow patterns and also demonstrates working with complex task flow. This chapter also demonstrates the inclusion of business rules to build a dynamic participant list. This chapter covers patterns that allow you to explore the feasibility to build a participant list statically, dynamically, or based on rules. The task assignment patterns section demonstrates how tasks are assigned statically, dynamically, or based on rules to the participants. The ad hoc assignment patterns, delegation patterns, and escalation patterns give depth to the chapter. The various other advanced features such as exclusion, notification, ECM integration, access policy, and so on are covered in detail along with elaboration on routing patterns, delegation, and so on.
Chapter 5, Interaction Patterns, discusses how processes interact and integrate with other systems, processes, and services and how these interactions are facilitated by various interaction patterns. This chapter includes various patterns that help to communicate with other processes, systems, and services. This chapter focuses on patterns that facilitate collaborative interaction of process with other processes, service, events, and signals.
Chapter 6, Correlation Patterns, showcases patterns that offer solutions to scenarios where processes need to be interrupted on the fly and sometimes need to be cancelled. The solution to a scenario where a task needs to be changed and/or updated in an in-flight process or cases such as querying an in-flight process. This chapter also uncovers all those patterns that need to interact with an in-flight process and also will explain how we can relate processes and associate a message with the conversation that it belongs to. The much awaited 12c features include suspending process and activities. These are elaborated in the chapter along with various other patterns to cancel, update, and query a process or activity.
Chapter 7, Exception Handling Patterns, focuses on demystifying various Exception Handling Patterns. This chapter focuses on exception classification, exception propagation, exception handling mechanism, and fault management framework. This chapter explains the strategies of how exceptions are handled in Oracle BPMN with detailed coverage of the fault management framework. We will examine the handling of exceptions in tasks, subprocess, and processes while covering different categories of faults. We will also cover modeling for exception handling and various modeling best practice while taking care of exception handling. Though the chapter is focused on exception handling patterns, it covers various exception handling mechanisms, their implementation, and usage in Oracle BPM.
Chapter 8, Adaptive Case Management, focuses on the case management framework that enables building case management applications, which comprise business processes, human interaction, decision making, data, collaboration, events, documents, contents, rules, policies, reporting, and history. This chapter demonstrates the inclusion of human intuition, empowered case, knowledge workers, collaborative decision-making, enhanced content management, and social collaboration. This chapter elaborates on Oracle Adaptive Case Management solution and in the course of learning it, one can explore various patterns and features that enable designers, developers, and analysts to model case management solutions and bring in agility, true dynamism, collaborative decision making, and a 360-degree holistic view of the case. This chapter also covers milestone patterns, case framework, event patterns, localization, case states, case interaction patterns, holistic view, and ad hoc features.
Chapter 9, Advanced Patterns, covers patterns in analysis and discovery category, where alignment patterns demonstrates features such as analyze, refine, define, optimize and report, and business processes in the enterprise. Alignment patterns highlight how IT development and process models can be aligned with organization goals while performing alignment, learning enterprise maps, strategy models, value chain models, KPIs, and reports. This chapter will also show how to create different reports based on the information documented in the process such as RACI reports, and so on. This chapter heavily focuses on demonstrating round trips and business IT collaboration, which facilitates storing, sharing, and collaborating on process assets and business architecture assets. This chapter also focuses on creating a collaborative ecosystem for business and IT and a detailed analysis of PAM methods to emulate the process behavior.
Appendix, Installing Oracle BPM Suite12c, gives us a brief introduction to the technology used in the book and also lists the steps to install Oracle BPM. Perform the steps given in this appendix to install Oracle BPM 12c to implement the use cases demonstrated for each pattern in this book.
