Designing Efficient BPM Applications

Chapter 7. Creating Process Forms

In the previous chapter, you ran your New Vacation Request process using temporary forms. In this chapter, you will create the forms used by the requester and reviewer in the New Vacation Request process. 

Forms are not part of the BPMN standard. In Bonita BPM, when a process is instantiated by a user completing a form, you create a contract that defines the data that the process requires the form to return when it is submitted. You also need a contract and form for each human task.

You can use any tool to create a form, as long as the contract is respected. In this chapter, we will use the Bonita BPM Studio UI Designer. The UI Designer is an environment for creating application pages. A page is the part of an application that is visible to the user in a web browser. A page can present information to a user, and can get information from a user. A page that is part of a process is called a form.

Vacation Request Form

The vacation request form contains the set of fields that the user must complete to request vacation. This is the start date, return date, and number of days, which you specified in the data model in Chapter 6 and added to the contract for process instantiation.

To create this form there are two steps: generate the basic form, and then update it to create the form field layout that you want.

To generate the form, follow these steps:

1. Select the New Vacation Request pool and go to the Details panel, Execution tab, Contract pane. ...