How to View Guided Business Process Log Messages Understanding Guided Business Process Log Messages

Using Approval Management 26-5 ■ Approval task configurations, including policies for substitution and modification of approvers, configuration of self-approval, and repeated approvers. For more information, see Section 26.2.1, Task. Figure 26–2 shows the various stages in a sample approval pattern. Figure 26–2 Approval List Structure These are described in more detail in Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle SOA Suite. The approval pattern consists of four stages: ■ Header approval ■ Line approval ■ Receipt verification ■ Payment Header approval runs in parallel with line approval and receipt verification. After these stages run, the payment stage runs. Each of the four stages has list builders. Multiple list builders in a stage can run in serial or parallel to one another. One or more approvers can exist within each list builder. Figure 26–3 illustrates these concepts. 26-6 Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management Figure 26–3 Stages and Their List Builders These concepts are described in the sections that follow.

26.2.2 Service Data Objects

ADF Business Components objects can be exposed easily as Service Data Objects SDOs through the service interface. This provides a flexible way to accept business entities. Subsequently, supporting SDOs natively, enables us to accept multiple business entities. This also lays the foundation for future Flexfield SDO support. Since an SDO is a structured XML, you can pass it in as static XML through the task payload. A collection is defined in an entity parameter for the task. It enables access to a portion of the business entity as an XML fragment retrieved by an XPATH expression. Keys allow us to identify the primary keys in this fragment. An entity parameter is the definition that tells us how to access an SDO or a static XML. An entity parameter captures the following information for an SDO: ■ Identity of a reference in the overall SCA process, including the Web service definition language WSDL for the SDO web service ■ Method to invoke ■ Input message to the web service ■ Output message to the web service ■ Collections Using Approval Management 26-7 An entity parameter captures the following information for a static XML: ■ XSD for the static XML ■ Collections For example, an expense voucher can have hierarchical groupings of header, lines, and cost centers. For approval policy purposes, you may only define a collection on header and lines if these are the only components required for determining the set approvers. It is not necessary to map as collections those parts of the business document that are not necessary to define rules. For more information, see Implementing Business Services with Application Modules and Integrating Service-Enabled Application Modules in Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developers Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.

26.2.3 Stages

A stage is a set of approvals related to a collection. The same collection can be associated with multiple approval stages. Figure 26–4 illustrates the mapping of stages and collections. Figure 26–4 Mapping of Stages and Collections Each approval stage is associated with a collection. In Figure 26–4 , there are four stages in the approval. ■ Header Approval is associated with the Expense Header collection. ■ Receipt Verification is associated with the Expense Header collection. ■ Payment is associated with the Expense Header collection. ■ Line Approval is associated with the Expense Lines collection. A compound approval may consist of multiple stages and then can be modeled in serial or parallel with each other. Each stage consists of list builders to determine the list of approvers. Optionally, each list builder can be associated with an approval policy, that is, a set of rules. At run time, the appropriate set of approvals are returned based on the list builders used within the stage and on the associated policies. 26-8 Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management

26.2.4 List Builders

As described in Section 26.2.3 , each approval stage consists of list builders to determine the actual list of approvers. The following list builders are supported. ■ Names and Expressions Enables you to construct a list using static names, or names coming from XPath expressions. ■ Approval Groups Includes predefined approver groups in the approver list. Approval groups can be static or dynamic. ■ Job Level Ascends the supervisory hierarchy, starting at a given approver and continuing until an approver with a sufficient job level is found. ■ Position Ascends the position hierarchy, starting at a given approvers position and continuing until a position with a sufficient job level is found. ■ Supervisory Ascends the primary supervisory hierarchy, starting at the requester or at a given approver, and generates a chain that has a fixed number of approvers in it. ■ Management Chain Enables you to construct a list based on management relationships in the corresponding user directory. The management chain participant type only supports parallel routing when the first assignee in the management chain is a single user. You cannot specify parallel participants such as a set of users or a group, as the initial assignees in the management chain. ■ Rule-based Enables you to model rules that return different list-builder types based on different conditions. For example, if you model a supervisory list builder with rules, the rule can return only the supervisory list builder. If you model a rule-based list builder, the rule can return different list-builder types.

26.2.5 Task Operations

Most of the standard human task operations also are available on AMX-based tasks. Some of the common operations include the following: Note: The Approval Groups, Job Level, Position, and Supervisory list builders are specific to AMX, and are described in detail in Section 26.3.6.3, How to Model and Configure List Builders. For information about the Names and Expressions, Management Chain, and Rule-based list builders, see Creating a Single Task Participant List in the How to Assign Task Participants section in the Creating the Human Task Definition with the Human Task Editor chapter in Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle SOA Suite.