Specifying Data

Activities performed within the context of a business process may require data as their input or deliver data as output. This way activities manipulate workflow relevant data and transfer these data among themselves. The properties of these workflow data have to be defined in the model. For more details on workflow data refer to Workflow Data.

This section will explain how to work with workflow data in the Process Workbench. In the section Data Integration, more details on working with concrete data are found.

Figure: Representations of Data in the Outline View and Diagram of the Process Workbench

Creating Data

To create a data you can either:

• Select Data under Items in the diagram toolbar palette and choose the type of data you want from its pop-up menu. Then, move the mouse pointer to the diagram canvas to place the data symbol there. The data is created by subsequently clicking on the diagram canvas and will appear in the Outline view.
• Or in the Data section of the Outline view area, select Data and from the pop-up menu select New and the data type you want. The created data will appear in the Outline tree view.
• With the drag-and-drop functionality you can drag a data symbol from the Outline view area and drop it to the diagram canvas.

Figure: Creating a Data Element

Using Predefined Data

You can use one of the predefined data, which is displayed in the Outline view. Simply add it to the diagram via drag and drop.

Figure: Predefined Data

Properties

Double-click on the new data symbol to open the data properties dialog. Choose an ID and a name for the workflow data. Select General from the left pane. The following general properties get displayed.

• Element OID - Auto generated ID for that element
• Name - name of the data
• ID - Please note that IDs containing hyphens, blanks or dots and IDs starting with digits are not supported.
• Visibility Public - If you select the Visibility Public check box, the data becomes visible and available for reference from any other model. For more information, please refer to Multi Package Modeling Preferences section of Setting Process Manager Preferences chapter. By default, all data types support the Visibility Public option.
• Description - Specify description for the data. If the description is provided, the tool tip text is displayed for Primitive data, Structured data and Document data.

Figure: Properties - General

Click the data type on the left pane of the properties dialog. There you can edit the data type specific properties. For a detailed discussion of the configuration of the Stardust data types, see the section Data Integration.

Figure: Data Properties Dialog

Simulation

In this section you can specify simulation configurations, as described detailed in the chapter Simulation Configurations of the Stardust Simulation Guide.)

Effort Planning

In this section you can set the following Process Effort properties:

Figure: Effort Planning Properties of an Data Element

Please refer to the chapter Project Effort Calculation for detailed information on this functionality.

Deleting Data

To delete a data, use the option Delete in the data's pop-up menu in a diagram or in the Outline view tree area.

To remove a data symbol from the diagram, choose the option Delete Symbol in the data's pop-up menu. After this operation the data and the data mappings between activities and the data will still be part of the model.

Working with Referenced Data

When the provider-consumer relationship is established between two models, the data of the provider model can be referenced in the consumer model. To reference the data, perform the following steps:

1. From the Outline View of the consumer model, drag the referenced data from the File Connection node


Figure: Data Available for Reference

2. Drop the referenced data to the diagram canvas
3. Create data mapping for the activity

When you drag-and-drop the referenced data the reference is created and the referenced model data appears in the locally defined model data.

Figure: Data Available for Reference

For more information, please refer to the section Referencing Model Elements of the External Model Resources chapter.

Note that if the data with identical ID already exists in the consumer or referencing model then you cannot refer the data of the provider or referenced model. Similarly, you cannot create a data in the consumer model, if the data with identical ID is in use as a reference from a provider model. In such a case, a model validation error is displayed.

For more information, please refer to the section Consistency Checks of the Deploying a Workflow Model chapter.