Process patterns

Patterns for process design are a bit more concrete than solution patterns and describe how to implement common requirements.

Creating process chains

If you think of an end-to-end business process, you might get the idea of implementing it the same way in Appian. So, you create one main process model, which then utilizes multiple sub-processes. This is a great idea when drawing process models for humans, but a bad idea when implementing a process model to be executed in software.

In Appian, this main model would stay active and cannot be updated until it is completed. So, any change in higher-level logic becomes complicated. Instead of this human-oriented pattern, do not implement the main process at all, but create a chain of process phases in which each phase decides about the next phase to be started. This way, there is no long-lived process instance, and updates to the parent logic are much easier.

Keep these individual process models simple and self...