Process Observer Discussion

[JChristophNolte]

This thread is dedicated to questions and discussions around the Process Observer component that is part of Business Suite.

Process Observer is used in different scenarios, including and prominently with Operational Process Intelligence.

For details on what Process observer is see here.

[keohanster]

Hi Christoph,

For someone coming from an SAP Workflow environment, I am very familiar with the power of events - and raising BOR events is easy.   So this looks like it will be a great project.

Question: In the Workflow World, we know that certain changes do not get reflected immediately, and so we sometimes have to 'refresh the org buffers' (swu_obuf).  This comes in very handy in Dev, where you are often clicking on this, saving, clicking on that, saving, etc.  Just resync the buffers and all your changes are enabled.

Are changes made to, say, a Process Definition immediately taken into consideration - or only acted upon the next time you run Process Monitor?

Thanks,
Sue

[JChristophNolte]

Hi Sue,

thanks for your question. A SAP Business Workflow background surely provides a good starting point for working with Process Observer - we're using some Workflow technology, terminology and thinking. And while this is quite helpful, "deep Workflow knowledge" is certainly no pre-requisite for working on Process Observer.

To answer your question: Process Monitor is purely a tool for visualization and while some data is cached almost all changes of process definitions should be reflected immediately (with the exception of some texts). For good measure you can re-start the process monitor (POC_MONITOR); there are no additional buffers to be reset.

There is some buffering going on with the process definitions, though. When saving the process definition the active BOR events of all process definitions are determined and put into a separate database table that holds the list of "active" events, i.e. events that are relevant for Process Observer; table BOR Events Relevant for Process Monitoring (POC_V_BOR_EVT) can be viewed in IMG activity Check Process Monitoring Events for Bus. Object Repository. If you change your facade layer content, an update of this table may be necessary - so go into the process definition, change something, save and change back to trigger an update of this buffer. This triggers report POCR_UPDATE_BOR_EVENT, which actually carries out the update - and you could just run this report.

Finally, you should look into version handling when changing process definitions - significant changes to process definitions may cause unexpected results in your process logs. But I guess this should be discussed separately... I may need to think about a new blog post.

Best regards,
Christoph