Class Process

A instance of Process represents a stateful process executing a series of Tasks, which may be:

• user interactions
• calls to DataSources (hence: any database or web service)
• arbitrary code
• other Processes

A Process is stateful in the sense that it maintains state across the different tasks that are executed.

This class is not meant to be created and used, it is actually documentation of settings allowed in a DataSource descriptor (.ds.xml file), for use with Smart GWT Pro Edition and above. See com.smartgwt.client.docs.serverds for how to use this documentation.

This allows you to maintain context as you walk a user through a multi-step business process in your application, which may involve multiple operations on multiple entities. Each Task that executes can use the Process state as inputs, and can output a result which is stored in the Process state - see TaskIO.

A Process can have multiple branches, choosing the next Task to execute based on Criteria - see DecisionTask and MultiDecisionTask.

Because a Process may return to a previous Task in various situations, the data model of a Process is strictly speaking a graph (a set of nodes connected by arbitary interlinks). However, most processes have sequences of several tasks in a row, and the definition format allows these to be represented as simple Arrays called "sequences", specified via sequences. This reduces the need to manually specify IDs and interlinks for Tasks that simply proceed to the next task in a sequence.

Processes follow all the standard rules for encoding as ComponentXML, however, note that the <Process> tag allows any kind of ProcessElement (tasks, decisions and sequences) to appear as a direct subelement of the <Process> tag without the need for an intervening <elements> or <sequences> tag. The example below demonstrates this shorthand format.

  <Process ID="processId">
      <DSRequestTask ID="dsRequestTaskId" nextElement="sequenceId" ..>
          <inputFieldList>
              <value>order.countryName</value>
          </inputFieldList>
          <outputFieldList>
              <value>order.countryName</value>
              <value>order.continent</value>
          <outputFieldList>
      </DSRequestTask>
      <sequence ID="sequenceId" >
          <StateTask ../>
          <StateTask ../>
          <StateTask ../>
          <StateTask nextElement="userTaskId" ../>
      </sequence>
      <UserTask ID="userTaskId" ../>
      ...
  </Process>
  

NOTE: you must load the standard DataBinding module before you can use Process.