The DCR Flow Editor enables you to create flows, or scenarios. You can also create flows using DCR Simulator.
New flows can be created from the DCR Dashboard page or from within DCR Whiteboard under the Simulation menu. Select Create New Flow which will launch DCR Flow Editor.
Fill out the Type, Business Type and Simulation Title.
You can now drag activities listed in the top into the different swimlanes. We first drag Fill out expense report into the Employee swimlane, then Approve into Manager and finally Pay out into Finance.
Business type
A scenario can be classified as
- as is
- to be
Using the business type the flows can easily be filtered on the dashboard of the portal showing the flow of a given process.
Validating flows
You can verify that the flow is valid by clicking the Validate Trace button:
A notification is shown in that the flows is valid and all activities are marked with a green border indicating that the flow is valid.
What happens if we swap Approve and Pay out?
We notice that we could fill out the expense report as the border is green. The border on Pay out is red indicating that this activity cannot be executed at the moment.
If you change this flow to a forbidden scenario we notice that the flow is now valid as the DCR process engine captures the error and mark which activity cannot be executed with a yellow border.
As the flow is Forbidden it is considered a valid trace as it cannot be executed.
Adding duration to flows
In DCR Flow Editor you can add time. You simply drag the Clock in the upper left corner to the swimlane. You will be prompted to will out the duration:
The result appears as follows:
If you add another clock between Approve and Pay out with a duration of 7 days and then click Validate Trace you will notice that the trace is invalid as the deadline of 7 days is passed.
If you click on a clock icon you can modify the duration.
Export a flow as an image
You can export a flow as an image or in dcr xml format by using the File menu. For images you can choose Horizontal and Vertical placement of the swimlanes, i.e. whehter the roles are on the left as above (Horizontal) or in the top (Vertical).
Export scenario will produce a log in dcr xml log format.
