LAB: Create an Application in BMC Helix Innovation Studio- Deep Dive on Process Designer (Session 3 of 3)

This is Part 3 of the Hands-On Lab series for BMC Helix Innovation Studio! As with the earlier labs, these exercises are based on the learning tutorial content that are part of the BMC Helix Innovation Studio documentation.

Prerequisite

  • A BMC Helix Environment or a local developer sandbox running BMC Helix Innovation Studio. If you don't already have this, please request access to the Docker images from the Developer portal

  • Install the tutorial application, with full name com.example.lunchcatering, version 3.0.0. Note that if you were in Lab 1, you probably created your own similar application using your own application id. Installing this one will not affect your previous work. The reason to install this one is to make sure the lab instructions match your starting point exactly.
    1. If you were already in Lab 2, you may have already started work on com.example.lunchcatering based on version 2.0.0. For this lab, you should install version 3.0.0 by following these steps:
      1. Use the Create Install Package command to create a backup of your earlier work with com.example.lunchcatering (you could call it 2.1.0 for example).
      2. Use the Uninstall command to remove it from your instance.

        image-2024-4-15_11-35-51.png

    2. Download the com.example.lunchcatering-3.0.0-INSTALL.zip.

      Important

      Note that certain versions of Windows Explorer will report a format problem with the zip file, because of a difference in the format of Java's zip library. You can ignore these errors.

      On the Workspace page, use the Install button to load 3.0.0 Lunch Tutorial application and go to the Application page.

    3. Your BMC Helix Innovation Studio should look like this - note the Views that are already there.
      image-2024-4-15_11-37-17.png
  • If you have not already done so, and you have additional time, you could read through the application requirements analysis found in Analysis-and-design-for-a-solution-to-the-lunch-ordering-problem. For this lab setting we will be skipping right to implementation due to time constraints, but it is a great idea to have some idea of the personas and requirements and you can refer to this document for that purpose.

Supporting public documentation

It is recommended that you have previously read the introductory information, such as the  orientation found in the published BMC Helix Platform documentation. Note that in the tutorial content itself, some links to documentation may not work correctly because the tutorial content is not yet part of public documentation. In this case, always refer to the currently published documentation at the preceding link.

Scope of this Lab

In this session, we will work toward building a complete business process for the lifecycle of a lunch order. Along the way, we will use key process designer techniques including User Task, User Message, Timer, Exclusive Gateway, Multi-Instance Loop, and Error Boundary. There is quite a bit of material here, and the expectation is that it is not likely to be finished within one session, so the lab can be completed using your own sandbox after the session ends.

If you did not attend the earlier lab, take a minute to check out the user interface of the application by launching it, and/or noting the definitions of the views. You will need to use this while testing the application logic in your process.

Lab Guide

Now, follow along the topics in the tutorial that introduce the process enhancements described in the section of the tutorial:

  1. Overview of building the Order Lifecycle process
  2. Adding-additional-states-to-the-order-lifecycle
  3. Implementing-Order-completion-using-a-Timer
  4. Using-a-Multi-Instance-Loop-for-Employee-notifications
  5. Order-cancellation-with-conditional-gateways-and-exception-handling

Upon Completion

As mentioned earlier, you may not have had enough time to complete all the process building techniques in this session, but you can plan on continuing the lab after the session ends. If you are very experienced at BMC Helix Innovation Studio and somehow do finish it, please assist others who may be struggling. Remember that there are many powerful capabilities in BMC Helix Innovation Studio that were not touched on here, especially the ability to add native code to the application. These are described in later modules of the tutorial.

If you would like to install the solution to all three of these lab exercises, you can uninstall whatever you have for this application, then install the com.example.lunchcatering-4.0.0-INSTALL.zip file.

You can also install an even more elaborate version that includes a set of sample data and an enhanced view for ordering from a photo-based menu.

Happy Innovating!

 

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