SAP Business Workflow can be used to define business processes.
Workflow is used in most of SAP business transactions.
Business processes that involve a workflow often require that corresponding documents be created or processed
This can occur, for example, when an application (for a loan, an insurance policy etc.) Has been approved or rejected during the workflow process.
Open XML documents are most suited for this scenario of adding documents
To a workflow and I will explain why.
With open XML we can tag each part of the document, so in run time
We can show/hide this part.
For example let's take an example.
We will create a demo workflow for a Vacation Request
We will create a template that contains 2 paragraphs:
employee information and manager approval.
all the variable fields will be used with content controls in MS-word.
and here is the template we will use
We have a little problem with the templates paragraphs.
we would like that the Employee will not see the manger part.
to solve that we have to find a method to "mark" the manager part and show/hide it depends on
the entity witch gets the document.
we will use Building Blocks method, and in this way we can tag all the paragraph and by that control it's visibility
the same way as we use Content Control or any other tagging method.
Create a new Building Block for later use.
Insert the building block to the template.
the building block should be tagged as we do with Content Controls
and than it could be found using it's tag and be deleted from the document.xml part of the OPC ( the Zip container ).
the quick parts will be tagged "MangerAPP".
after creating the template, we will upload the file to the application server or any server directory witch the SAP identifies.
during the Workflow task, the template will create a new document using Open XML standards
the document will be merged with it's contents, and will be sent to the workflow participant.
each workflow participant will add it's data to the document ( the document is interactive )
and the document will be sent to SAP where it's contents will be derived.
by using Open XML technology with SAP business workflow we can take up Workflow capabilities
and give the users a known infrastructure for documents.
and that's for this time
Ronen Almog
Bluesky