Capturing process information and passing it into a workflow

To process fulfillment, most workflow activities pass data to an external system.

Activities expose the required and optional input fields to the process workflow. Activities can return a response from the external system to inform the status of the activity. The response from one activity can be mapped to the input parameter of another.

As a service catalog administrator or internal service supplier, you can enter data directly into the activity's input fields. You can also create process inputs to capture user request data during a service request.

Information captured during a service request

BMC Helix Digital Workplace collects process context and process input information from a service request and a service. This information can be passed to a workflow associated with the service request.

The following illustration shows how the information is collected and passed to a workflow:

A service request includes details of a service generated from a service request definition. When an end user submits a service request, the following information can be passed to the workflow:

Process input information—Answers to the questions that are part of the service questionnaires. For more information about questions, see Creating-service-questionnaires.
Process context information:
- Details automatically generated from a service request (for example, a user login name or the email address of the user who requested the service)
- Information automatically generated from the service request definition:
  - Service profile (for example, ID of the service in BMC Helix Digital Workplace Catalog)
  - Costs and prices (for example, yearly service cost)
  - Service Level Agreements information (for example, service provisioning time)

Important

Service questionnaires can include process questions and nonprocess questions. Only answers to process questions can be passed to a workflow.

Before you begin

Open an existing workflow or create a new workflow, as described in Exploring-the-workflow-designer.

To capture and pass information into a workflow

Create one or more of the required process variables:
- To pass information from answers to a service questionnaire submitted by a requester, create process input variables. For more information, see Adding-process-input-variables-to-a-workflow.
- To pass information from a service request or a service, create process context variables. For more information, see Adding-a-process-context-variable-to-a-workflow.
Map the created process variables with the input parameters of a corresponding action. For more information, see Using-responses-from-a-connected-system-in-your-workflow.

Required licensing

SaaS subscribers who use BMC Helix ITSM or BMC-Helix-Virtual-Agent-Basic-service are entitled to this feature.

Where to go from here

Creating-service-questionnaires