NovellÒ

exteNd Composer

Process Manager

5.0

January 2004

Welcome to Novell^® exteNd Composer^TM Process Manager Version 5.0. These release notes include the following sections:

What is New	Enhancements in Process Manager 5.0
Installation notes	Important information about enabling exteNd Composer Process Manager
Software and hardware requirements	Software and hardware needed to run exteNd Composer Process Manager
Setup and Configuration	Setup guide for exteNd Composer Process Manager installation
Features	Features in this release of exteNd Composer Process Manager
Known issues	Known issues with this release of exteNd Composer Process Manager

What is New

exteNd Composer Process Manager 5.0 has been enhanced to work with the new Novell exteNd Composer 5.0.

Service Provider / Service Provider Types: As part of Web Services orchestration and management, this enhancement provides the capability to create an indirection layer which allows for a process/activity to associate different implementations by categories and individual implementations.

Process Versioning: This enhancement provides the capability to create multiple versions of a process and to set the effective date for a version of a process. Without intervention, new processes instances will use the version of the process as of the effective date.

Not Available Period: The user may set a ‘not available period’ for a day, week or month so that an activity would not attempt to invoke the underlying implementation during that period.

Easily Drag-and-Drop to Canvas: This new user interface enhancement enables the user to easily drag-and-drop Components and WSDL from the Navigation Pane directly to the Process Design Canvas.

My SQL Support: Support for using MySQL as a database for process persistence has been added.

Installation Issues

As of extend 5 Composer Enterprise Edition 5.0, Process Manager is no longer installed separately. To make installation easier, the exteNd Composer Process Manager and the Composer Connectors are automatically installed when extend 5 Composer Enterprise Edition 5.0 is installed.

Evaluation licenses are provided for each of the Composer solutions. The evaluation licenses expire 90 days after installation.

Within the Composer designer, you can enable any of the Composer solutions using the Systems Information dialog’s Licenses tab. Navigate to the System Information dialog from the Help / About exteNd Composer menu item. Press the System button and click the Licenses tab.

To enable a Composer solution, simply click its associated ‘Enabled’ checkbox and press OK.

Note: To enable exteNd Composer Process Manager, you need to enable PROCESS.

When you purchase a full license for a solution, you may edit the solution’s license by clicking the Edit… button and entering the full license.

The same is true on the server side and a console dialog is provided for enabling Composer solutions and editing license keys.

If you experience problems with the installation of exteNd Composer Process Manager, contact Novell technical support for manual installation steps.

Software and hardware minimum requirements

For persistence, Composer Process Manager requires a RDBMS to be configured. For exteNd Composer 5.0, the following RDBMS platforms are supported:

Supported in exteNd 5 Beta:

MySQL 4.1 (The beta version should not be used for production.)

Supported in exteNd 5 (post-beta):

Oracle 8i and 9i
IBM DB2 7.2.4, 8.1

NOTE: You must use the JDBC2 option with DB2—JDBC1 is not supported.

Microsoft SQL Server 7.0/2000
Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 11.9.2, 12, 12.5
Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere 8

There is no additional hardware or 3rd party software required to install or use Composer Process Manager within exteNd Composer. Please see the System Requirements section in the exteNd Composer Release Notes.

Composer Process Manager is engineered to work in conjunction with your exteNd Composer core products and is compatible with the same major version of the core products.

Features in exteNd Composer Process Manager

The following is a brief description of the feature set provided by Novell exteNd Composer Process Manager 5.0. For a more detailed look at the features and functionality please read the exteNd Composer Process Manager User Guide provided with the software and on the CD-ROM.

Process Manager is a separately installable product that integrates directly with your existing exteNd Composer installation and provides you with the ability to create, deploy and administer automated business processes.

Novell exteNd Composer Process Manager is comprised of three parts: Process Designer, Process Server and Process Administrator, which are described below:

Process Designer – Process Designer is a highly productive visual development environment where both business analysts and application programmers can become more effective in developing and deploying integration applications.

Composer Process Designer provides a graphical diagramming interface that enables users to design Process Diagrams by linking multiple Activities (e.g. Web Services Activities, Composer Component Activities and Sub-process Activities).

Composer Process Designer also provides the ability to set conditions of execution (e.g., join, exit, timeouts, etc…) and linking conditions (e.g., conditional - evaluate value of an XPath expression of one or more of the documents being managed; unconditional – execute always) and create the mappings required to build complete business process models.

Composer Process Designer provides the capability to walkthrough (or animate) and/or execute the process model you create prior to deployment.

User Interface

The Composer Process Manager User Interface is illustrated in Figure 1, below. You will notice a Process category at the top of the tree in the Category Pane.

Figure 1 - Composer Process Manager UI

As illustrated in Figure 1, when a Process Component is in focus the user is presented with three new panes:

o The Process Model pane (on the right) in which the user draws the process model diagram

o The Object Properties pane (center-top) with which the user sets properties for elements of the process model (e.g. the graph, activities, links, text and shapes)

o The Overview pane (center-bottom), which enables the user to navigate the process model and zoom in or out on (and/or pan across) various areas of the canvas

As shown in Figure 1, Composer Process Manager introduces several new tools to the toolbar, which enable the user to define the process model. The following table describes these tools.

Tool	Icon	Description and User Gestures
Select		The Select tool is used to click on objects to apply focus to them. It is also used to drag objects and resize objects. Upon clicking it, the Select Tool remains down (darkened) indicating it is enabled or on. The mouse pointer is displayed as an arrow reflecting that the Select Tool is on.
Pan		Pan enables the user to navigate around the diagram by holding the left mouse button down and dragging it to the area s/he wants to display.
Text		The text tool enables the user to annotate the process model with text.
Activity		The user may select the currently displayed Activity tool or may drop down this toolbar to display the list of Activity types described in Table 1.
Link		The Link tool is used to create Control Links between one or more Activities within the diagram. To draw a Link between two Activities, the user selects the Link tool. The user then left-mouse clicks on the source Activity and then left mouse clicks on the target Activity and the link is drawn.
Shape		The Shape tool enables the user to annotate the process model with squares and ovals.
Zoom		The Zoom tool enables the user to set the zoom percentage via the drop down to 2000%, 1000%, 500%, 200%, 150%, 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, Fit in Window. To use the Zoom tool the user clicks on the arrow button and selects their desired zoom percentage. The user may also type a percentage into the Zoom tool. As the user zooms using the Marquee Zoom or the Interactive Zoom (available from the Composition menu), the zoom percentage displayed by the zoom tool will be updated to reflect the current zoom percentage.
Layout		The Layout tool enables the user to automatically redraw the Process Diagram in one of the following layouts: Circular, Hierarchical, Orthogonal, Symmetric or Tree.
Execute All		The user may execute the Process by clicking this button.
Start Animation		The user starts the animation process by clicking this button.
Stop Animation/ Execution		The user may stop the animation or execution of the process by clicking this button.

Using the Process Designer, the user drops Activities on the Process Model pane with a single click. The user can create Links between Activities by selecting the Link tool on the toolbar, then clicking on the source Activity and then the target Activity. This creates a Link between the two Activities that can then be moved and stretched using the mouse.

To support iterative design, Novell exteNd Composer Process Manager enables users to interact with and modify Activities and Links. Activities and Links can be added, moved, resized, copied and deleted at any time. Also, the overall canvas view can be viewed at any magnification.

Each of the Activity types supported by Composer Process Manager is described in the following table.

Activity Type	Description
Composer Component	The Producer Activity provides for runtime interaction with a Producer Component or Service to interact with one or more external systems using one or more Composer Components (e.g. JDBC, 3270, 5250, CICS RPC, JMS, HTML, Telnet, EDI or XML Map as well as Composer JMS Services or Composer Web Services). The user may drill down on a Component Activity to view and edit the Composer Component.
Sub-process	A business process management solution must provide a means for a business process to initiate other business processes. Since business processes can be very complex, this feature allows for these processes to be implemented modularly. A Sub-process Activity represents and references a sub-process. This allows for diagrams to be viewed at a high level by referencing one or more Sub-process Activities. The user may drill-down on a sub-process Activity to view and edit the sub-process diagram.
Synchronize	A specialized activity type that allows the merging of information returned from a repetitively executed sub-process. The user can specify different components for the initial component to set up the output and a separate component for all subsequent returns.
Web Service Receive	The Web Service Receive Activity provides for runtime interaction with a published Web Service and correlates a received message with a current process instance.
Web Service Send	The Web Service Send Activity provides for runtime interaction with a published Web Service. It enables the Process Manager user to select the Web Service WSDL Resource, Service Name, Binding, Operation, Endpoint Locator and Connection. This is similar to the WS Interchange Action introduced in Composer 3.0.

Composer Process Manager Actions

Composer Processes may consist of a combination of the aforementioned Activities. The Component Activity may use any of the Composer Components types (e.g., XML Map and Services) depending on what Connectors are installed. This provides unparalleled integration capabilities with other systems that are described in Composer Components as well as remote Web Services described via WSDL.

Composer Process Manager allows the user to define multiple endpoints required to build long running, complex business processes spanning multiple platforms that may not respond immediately. To provide this type of functionality there are Actions that are added to Composer when Process Manager is installed. The Process Actions are described in the table below.

Action	Description
Browse Waiting Activity	The Browse Waiting Activity Action will search the Activity queue by the addressee or addressees described in the addressee(s) expression. When evaluated, this expression will either return a string or a list of nodes. If a list of nodes is returned, each node string will be considered an addressee. This will allow users to be associated with Groups. So an application may choose to associate Bob Smith with addressees BSmith, CustService, Boston (where CustService and Boston are groups). If the expression returns a node list with these three values, the action would return all the waiting activities for the three groups (sorted by priority and timestamp).
Find Waiting Activity	In conjunction with the Correlation ID specified in the Web Service Receive and the documents being received the Process Instance is Looked up and optionally the Input Document is returned.
Lock/Unlock Waiting Activity	This action enables the user to programmatically lock a waiting activity record in an activity queue. This activity will help support human workflow groups by filtering browse operations to only those records that are not in a locked state. This will enable groups of users to use the same work queue without compromising the work of other users within the group.
Process Execute	This action instantiates a Process. There are two options available Spawn – used to instantiate a Process that will execute on its own with no link back to the Service. Call – used to instantiate a Process that will execute and the results returned to the Service.
Reassign Addressee	This action allows the user to programmatically reassign a specific activity record or an entire work queue to a new addressee.
Release Waiting Activity	Once the user has determined that the Process Instance should continue, this action is used to pass back the activity result document

Runtime Testing (Animation) - Provide a method of easily testing and debugging process models from the same interface used in development. The user interface provides visual feedback regarding which activity is being performed and the links, which are being traversed.

Process Server – The Process Server instantiates Processes; associates Work Items with processes and provides the queuing system. The Process Server also performs the execution tasks required such as managing time outs, retries, exit conditions, joins, document management, etc.

Process Administrator – The Process Administrator is used to monitor and manage running processes, report on any non-archived process and manage activity queues.

The Process Administrator enables the user to View, Suspend and Terminate Process instances.

Process Administrator presents a four-tabbed interface. The four tabs are described in the following table.

Tab	Description
Main Console	The Composer Process Main Console tab displays the count of Active and Completed processes. It also shows whether or not the process engine is running. If the process engine is running, the Process Engine Status is Running and the user may stop the process by pressing the Stop button. If the process engine is not running, the Process Engine Status is Suspended and the user may resume the process by pressing the Start button. From the Main Console tab the user may purge process records, which completed and/or otherwise terminated on or before a specific date. From the Main Console tab the user may launch the Manage Activity Queue page.
Process Statistics	The Process Statistics tab provides a list of all processes and a count of Running and Completed process instances for each process. On the Totals line, the total number of Processes, Running process instances and Complete Process instances is displayed.
Process Status	The administrator uses the Process Status tab to display a view of the process instances. The administrator can drill down on a specific a specific process instance by clicking the ID link. Clicking on this link will launch another window in which the Process Detail screen, described later, is presented.
Log	The Log tab presents a list of logged events.

Known issues

This release has the following known issues (workarounds are specified if known):

Installation

o For WebLogic and Websphere the installation of the Process50 database will be skipped since we cannot predict what database will be installed. Users will need to do this manually for these two platforms (e.g. the way it worked prior to 5.0) by accessing the Server Console and configuring the Process database using the RDBMS of their choice.

Deployment

o For Composer services to be successfully deployed as EJB service triggers, or process Components to be successfully deployed, it is necessary to perform a quick step. In the Composer/lib folder make a copy of the xcs-all.jar and name the copy xcs-all-ws50.jar.

o JMS Services and Process Components must be deployed as J2EE 1.2 to exteNd Application Server 4.0/4.01 if the application server is secured.

o If you were using Sybase as the Process Database in version 5.0-beta and deployed Process projects with version 5.0-beta, you will need to re-deploy those projects in release 5.0. You will also need to re-initialize the database.

Other

o After executing a process if the user goes to the menu item View\XML Docs\Show/Hide… and makes the process input and process output visible, and the re-executes the process, the process will complete but throw an exception trying to display the DOMs.

Workarounds: If this occurs you can close and open the component. This will fix the problem and the process can then be executed as many times as required.

Alternatively, the user can simply select Ok from the Show/Hide dialog and click on the process graph, without moving the documents, and the documents will be visible.

o Composer Process Manager 5.0 does not support clustering. Clustering support will be implemented in a future release.

o Sybase Database: The Queue Statistics panel in the Process Manager Console may return inaccurate information if the Addressee (Queue Name) is identical for more than one activity. When this is the case, the total number of activities is also incorrect. Please see the Queue Status Panel for the correct information.

o Process manager console

Using Sybase as the datasource, the activity count on the queue statistics panel always displays 1, not the true number of activities. Clicking the Queue to get the details will properly show the correct activities.