About Flow rules
 

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• Process Modeler basics.
• Process Modeler - Editing assignment shapes
• Process Modeler - Editing decision shapes
• Process Modeler - Editing the Start shape
• Process Modeler - Editing the End shape
• Process Modeler - Editing a Ticket shape
• Process Modeler - Editing a Split-ForEach shape
• Process Modeler - Editing an Assignment Service shape

Click the Flow Editor toolbar button () to start Microsoft Visio and edit the flow. If Visio presents a warning about macros, select the choice to trust the publisher (source). (See How to set up Visio.)

Click the Return button () when you complete Visio editing.

To change the shape properties of an existing shape, but not alter the structure and relationships among shapes, access the Design tab, right-click a shape, and select the Edit tab.

As a best practice, ensure that everyone in your development team is using a common version of Visio. Process Commander operates identically for Visio versions 2003 and higher. However, when you save a flow rule edited with one version of Visio, that rule cannot later be edited using a lower version.

Flow rules containing too many shapes can introduce complex, difficult-to-debug processing into your application. As a best practice, guardrails recommend limiting a flow rule to contain 15 or fewer shapes, not counting Notify and Router shapes. If your flow grows to contain more than 15 shapes, revise the flow to call or branch to subflows to handle continuations, special cases, or non-mainstream processing.

These topics describe aspects of flow editing:

	Visio editing basics		Screen flow rules
	Flow properties		Notification shapes
	Start shape		Router shapes
	Assignment shapes		Service levels
	Assignment-Service shapes		Spin-off shapes
	Comment shapes		Split-Join shapes
	Connectors and flow actions		Split-ForEach shapes
	Decision shapes		Swimlane
	Call or branch to subflow shape		Ticket shapes
	FlowEnd shapes		Utility shapes
	Fork shapes		Using freeform shapes and other stencils
	Integrator shapes		Building a flow rule from an external flow diagram

C-494 KHATV 10/22/03 After you complete initial development and testing, you can delegate selected flow rules to line business managers. The Diagram tab of the Flow form provides managers with access to the fields most often updated.

For each flow rule in your application, consider which business changes might require rule updates, and whether to delegate the rule to non-developers who then can make such updates directly. See How to build for change.

Select > Process & Rules > Processes > Process Explorer to display the flow rules in the current application. See Process & Rules category — Processes landing page.

Use the Rules Explorer to list all the flow rules available to use.

Defining a flow rule that creates new work objects does not automatically make the new flow rule available from the portal. For step-by-step instructions, see How to create a flow and make it available.

Flow rules are part of the Process category. A flow rule is an instance of the Rule-Obj-Flow rule type.

Flow rules are normally stored in the PegaRULES database as rows of the pr4_rule_flow table.