Please sign up for the Signavio Platform: Registration for the Signavio BPM Academic Initiative by selecting: I agree that anonymized versions of all models I create using this platform can be made available for research purposes.

To log into the editor, please select Academic Login on the Signavio BPM Academic Initiative page.

Auxiliary materials for the laboratory:

• Activiti User Guide
• a book Activiti in Action

For the needs of today's classes you can deploy Activiti platform from the website: https://www.activiti.org/download-links (the lab is prepared for Activiti version 5) on the Apache Tomcat or JBoss Application Server. Then, you can launch the Activiti Explorer in your browser: http://localhost:8080/activiti-explorer, and then sign in to your account:

login: kermit
password: kermit

You can also use the temporary server version at our server: http://192.168.1.145:8080/activiti-explorer/ui/

When logged in, you should have noticed the top bar displaying the menu of 4 icons for administration of:

• Tasks - tasks,
• Processes - processes,
• Reports - reports,
• Manage - other issues, such as users, groups, database management, or process implementations.

In the Groups tab (Manage menu), look at the existing user groups. As an administrator user, we can use the default kermit user for a while, but we will need a non-admin user.

So, create a new user for you. Remember about a unique identifier! Assign your user to some groups but not the Admin group.

For better understanding of the BPM platform, we will create a very simplified model of the offer management process.

From the menu, select Processes. You should see 3 tabs:

1. My instances – to observe the existing instance of the process,
2. Deployed process definitions – to run processes deployed on the Activiti platform,
3. Model workspace – to create new models and deploy or edit existing process models.

In the Model workspace tab, click on the New Model button and create a new process model using the Activiti Modeler. Give your model a name and a description.

In the Activiti Modeler application window, set the process attributes (on the right side of the window). The key elements are: the process identifier (Process identifier) and the process name (Name), as using them we will be able to distinguish our process from other processes or processes of other users. Please also fill in the author's field (Process author).

By dragging from the left menu the Start event element, we will start modeling the process. At the beginning, let's model a very simplified process as follows:

As in the case of the process, the attributes for the BPMN elements we can set on the right side of the window.

• For the Start event element:
  • Documentation: Start proceeding with an offer.
  • Initiator: initiator (this will hold the user who initiated the process)
  • Name: Offer received
  • Form properties – click on … and in a new window, set the following attributes as in the screenshot:
    

• For the Specify offer task:
  • Documentation: Please add available specification for an offer as attachments.
  • Assignments: we have 3 possibilites
    
    • assignee – assign a task to a specific user,
    • candidateUsers – assign a task so that any of the specified users can execute it,
    • candidateGroups – assign a task so that any user belonging to the assigned group can execute it.
      

In our case, we only set the variable assignee to the value of ${initiator} – this notation means that we indicate the person who started the process (initiator) as the task performer.

Moreover, for this task, set the following Form properties:

• Specifications details (id: specDetails) – the level of detail of the order specification (as for now, we can set this as a boolean, and later we will convert it to enum, for representing more values like: accurate, sufficient, insufficient).
• Person responsible (id: responsible) – person assigned to the formal analysis of the request (responsible for the analysis); this is done for assigning a person and assigning it to the variable.