Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu

Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies

Swinburne University of Technology, Australia

An Artifact-centric Approach to Generating Web-based Business Process Driven User Interfaces

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 2

Introduction & Motivation Artifact-centric approach to business process model UI generation framework Discussions

Outline

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 3

The traditional task(process)–centric approaches

Modelling business processes and UIs done separately Each UI designed based on a single task Navigational dependency between UIs based on a sequence of tasks

Key issues of current approaches? Tasks glued by control flows Changes to task and its

corresponding UI difficult to be managed and validated (and done manually)

Relation between data required in each UI and task not described in the process data requirement is determined manually by UI modellers

Introduction & Motivation

A BC

DE

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 4

Introduction & Motivation Given process model If changes made to process

model, then How the propagation of changes of process models reflected

to the user interfaces How to determine the dependency between UIs, and

between each UI and its required data How to regeneration of the impact UIs done automatically

A need for artifact-centric approach for defining the specification of business processes

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 5

Artifact-centric approach Artifacts and their lifecycle – Selling process example

The ordering process starts when a customer places an order to the retailer for a particular product and ends when the customer pays the invoice.

The shipping process starts when the retailer creates a shipment and ends when the item arrives to the customer

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 6

Artifact-centric business process model (ACP Model) Business artifacts or entities

constitute concrete information chunks that the business creates and maintains, i.e., business records, documents

have life cycles that capture the end-to-end processing of a specific artifact, from creation to completion and achieving

Tasks/Services – used to create/update artifacts and move the state of artifacts from creation to completion and

achieving

Associations – associate tasks with artifacts services in a process make changes to artifacts in a manner that is

restricted by a family of constraints e.g., Business rule On what condition, a task is performed (on which

artifact)

Artifact-centric approach

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 7

Artifact-centric approach Business rules – to associate artifacts and tasks

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 8

UI Generation Framework User Interface Flow Model (UIF Model)

User interface container (UIC or Page) – A single web page with at least one input form

Interface – A form with input fields and submit button Navigational control flow – a control from one interface form in one

page to another page when a form submitted with all required inputs

OK OK

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 9

UI Generation Framework Two aspects of UIF model

Behavioral aspect – navigational control flow between form and page Informational aspect – artifacts and their input attributes that required in

each form in a page

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 10

UI Generation Framework MDA Approach to the generation of UIs for ACP

ACP Model User Interface Flow (UIF) Model Transformation

Behavioral and informational transformation The output UIF is structured in the XML

UIF Model HTML Code By XSLT processing (with predefined XSL and CSS) Each HTML page contains form(s) + required inputs

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 11

UI Generation Framework Three-layered Model-to-Model Transformation

Model-to-Model Transformation

Role-based Derivation

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 12

UI Generation Framework ACP model UIF model Transformation

1) Create artifact machine of each artifact by interpreting BRs

2) Create artifact system machine by composition technique

3) Generate behavior of UIF model from the system machine

4) Generate input required of each UI by extracting from pre-condition of BRs

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 13

XSL + CSS

UI Generation Framework

UIF Model HTML Code Transformation

XSLT

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 14

UI Generation Framework Integrate UI Generator to the artifact-centric business

process engine

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 15

Discussion Automatic generation of UIs for business processes

If changes occur to process model UIF Model retransformed and the UIs (HTML) regenerated

The navigational control and required attributes of UIs maintained in the process specification NOT UIs Ensure the changes of process model correctly propagate to UIs

UI modelers/designers focus on “front-end” design

Limitation UIF Model HTML Code needs a flexible (may be

complex) XSL design to support the various types of changes

WISE’10, 12-14 December 2010, Hong Kong, China Sira Yongchareon, Chengfei Liu, Xiaohui Zhao, and Jiajie Xu 16

Thank you