SAP CodeJam in Australia – SAP Cloud Platform Workflow & Business Rules

[Murali_Shanmu]

I would like to share my experience hosting the CodeJam event on SAP Cloud Platform Workflow & Business Rules. This was the first time a CodeJam event was conducted on this topic and it was a very special event. We had the first event in Sydney on 10^th July and repeated the same on 12^th July (hosted by nash.gajic  ). Thanks to SAP for providing the venue to host the event. We were also fortunate to have the presence of archana.shukla  from the Product Management team who flew in from Bangalore to support the event as an expert.

We had close to 25 participants both in Sydney and Melbourne with a mix of SAP customers, Partners and independent consultants. We kick started the day with an overview of the SAP Cloud Platform and the integration service portfolio.



Melbourne CodeJam

 



Sydney CodeJam

Archana Provided a brief overview on the Business Rules service and the roadmap including the vision to integrate/aggregate the different rule technologies in SAP.

We discussed upon the significance of the Rules service in the Cloud and also when to use this service as compared to some of the existing rules framework in SAP.

We took a simple scenario to address using Rules and Workflow service. In a typical onboarding event, an employee in SuccessFactors must be assigned to a buddy and provided appropriate IT equipment for their work. Based on the job role appropriate equipment needs to be assigned and depending on the value of the individual equipment, it needs to be approved by a manager.



 

The first half of the day was building a rule set which can be used later when developing workflows. We started the exercises by activating the relevant service in a trial account in SAP Cloud Platform. We had a minor issue enabling the rule service for the event in Sydney, but managed to use an alternate account to progress with the exercises. Participants were able to create a decision tables with rules to determine the equipments.



They also used the Text rule to determine if approval were required for equipments that exceeded 800$



Towards the end of this section, we learnt how to use API Business Hub to test the Business Rules project which was created



Once we completed testing the Rules service, we had a break for lunch were some good food was provided. It was great to see participants interacting with each other sharing some of their experience around SAP Cloud Platform.



Soon after lunch we began to focus on the next interesting service – Workflows.  We resumed the noon session with a brief introduction to the Workflow service and a walk through of the design time environment for this service within SAP WebIDE Fullstack. Since the Workflow service also uses Portal service and My Inbox Fiori App, participants learnt how to enable these services and prepare the Workflow Inbox and Monitoring apps before starting the development.



We learnt how to create a Workflow project in SAP WebIDE and use various tasks like Service task, User Tasks etc to model the below employee onboarding scenario.



By end of the day, participants were able to create work items in their My Inbox Fiori App and navigate through the different workflow monitoring apps to understand how to view the execution log and context.

   

Few participants also got to spend time on using the API Business Hub to play with the APIs to trigger the workflow and analyse the workflow instance.



We closed the event around 5pm and it was great to hear some good feedback. Participants liked working in smaller groups focused on a particular topic and they were keen to have more such events.

Thanks to all the participants, archana.shukla, nash.gajic, krishna.dalal (CodeJam Team) for another successful codeJam.

Looking to host a codeJam in your city? Follow this post. Also, don’t forget to check out the resources in the SAP Developer Center.