Workflow Designer
- sneha.tripathi
- Shekar Iyer
Workflow designer in Luma Automation is a user-friendly interface that gives developers powerful features for building and designing automated processes, human workflows, decision tables, and decision requirements diagrams using the globally recognized BPMN standards.
Business Processes are usually complex and may include many different steps, components, and endpoints across different technologies. Workflow designer is used to orchestrate, automate and deploy such complex Business processes. Here a developer can visually represent the sequence of business activities to be executed, information flow from one task to another, and design points needed to complete the Business process.
The Automation Workflows are used to automate your organization-specific processes that may connect to APIs, microservices, business decisions and rules, bots, and more. These workflows can be executed through various systems such as execution of a Luma Skill, an activity (such as resolution, closure) of a ticket in your ITSM system. These workflows can navigate the user through a process, take user inputs, evaluate rules and connect to target systems to execute configured tasks.
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a graphical representation method that is used to design and depict steps in a business process. Using BPMN notations, we can visually represent the detailed sequence of business activities and information flows that complete the business process.
Following are the three main elements used to create Business process diagrams:
Tasks: Tasks are the building blocks of a business process. There are various types of Tasks available in BPMN, that are used to design business processes. Tasks are presented by a rectangle with rounded corners and can connect to a third-party system to execute an activity at a specific step of the process
Gateways: These represent Decision points in a Business Process. Gateways are used to adjust the process execution path based on predefined conditions or events. These are represented as diamonds and can be exclusive or inclusive, parallel, complex, or based on data or events.
Events: Events are the triggers that start, modify or complete a Business process. ‘Event’ represents something that “happens” during the execution of a Business Process. In BPMN, events are represented as circles and indicate if the event occurs at the beginning, end, or during a business process. Some of the common Event types are message, timer, error, compensation, signal, cancel, escalation, link, and others.
Components of Workflow Designer
The Workflow designer in Luma automation enables Developers to drag and drop BPMN Events and Service tasks to design the workflow. You can create conditional paths, configure input and output information and create operations to be executed at each step.
Following are the Out-of-the-box elements available on Workflow Designer:
Event | BPMN Symbol | Description |
|---|---|---|
StartEvent |  | Start event of a Workflow. This represents the Start of the Workflow execution. Service Tasks and Decision gateways can be added after the start event in sequence to create the workflow. |
EndEvent |  | End event of a Workflow. This represents the End of the Workflow path. When the process has reached an end event, it is completed. When a sub process reaches an end event, the process flow returns to the parent level process. |
ServiceTask |  | Creates a Service Task in a Workflow. It is used to create or add Operations in a workflow. To create a process workflow, service tasks are added in sequence with the operations to be executed at each step. |
ScriptTask |  | Creates a Script Task in the workflow. It is used to execute a script as part of the workflow. The script tasks are added in sequence with the other Service Tasks to create a workflow. When the workflow process arrives at the Script Task, the configured script is executed. |
XOR Gateway |  | A diverging Exclusive Gateway. It is used to create alternative paths within a Process flow. When the execution of a workflow arrives at the gateway, all outgoing sequence flows are evaluated in the order in which they are defined. The workflow path whose condition evaluates to true is executed. |
Error Boundary Event |  | Error Boundary Event. It is used to handle the occurrence of errors during the execution of an activity or at a certain point in the flow of a process. When the workflow encounters an error, the path or series of activities linked to the error are executed. |
Following is a simple example of a Business workflow created in Luma Automation:
The above workflow represents a simple password reset process. The Workflow is triggered when the end-user requests to reset their password in systems such as Active Directory. In the first step, the user id provided by the end-user is validated. If the user id is valid, the password reset process is triggered and an email is sent to the requestor. In case the user id is invalid, the process ends.
Following are the Integration operations in the workflow:
‘Validate User’ to verify if the user id provided by the end-user is valid in the target system.
‘Reset Password’ to reset the password for the provided user id.
‘Notify User’ to notify the user of a successful password reset.
To learn about how to design and manage the workflow, refer to Create Workflow in Luma automation.