TIBCO Designer

TIBCO BusinessWorks is a scalable, extensible, and easy to use integration platform that allows you to develop, deploy, and run integration projects. TIBCO Designer is the graphical user interface (GUI) for defining business processes. BusinessWorks can help you specify the business logic and automate the processing of the interaction between the systems in your enterprise. This allows you to reduce the time to implement an integrated, enterprise-wide computing environment and ultimately lower the cost of deploying and maintaining the system

TIBCO Designer


An ideal solution for handling business process automation would be a tool that can handle the different environments and applications and allow you to create programmatic business rules easily. That tool should also allow you to automate your business processes for the greatest efficiency. TIBCO BusinessWorks allows you to model business processes with a graphical tool. You can use the BusinessWorks process definition palette to diagram complex business logic easily. Once the business rules have been specified, BusinessWorks can execute the business processes, allowing you to easily automate the critical functions of your business.

Starting TIBCO Designer

Click start->programs->Tibco>Designer_version

TIBCO Designer Administration



Startup panel Administration options

TIBCO Designer Interface Overview



Main Window - Project panel - Design panel - Configuration panel - Palette panel

TIBCO Designer - GUI

TIBCO Designer - Panels



Project Panel - A project contains resources that implement the enterprise integration. ExSharedConnections, ProcessDefinition Palette Panel - Palettes organize resources and allow you to add them to your project. You select resources in the palette panel and drag and drop them into the design panel to add them to your project.

TIBCO Designer - Panels



Design Panel - The design panel displays the current resource selected in the project panel. The contents of the selected resource are shown in the design panel. For example, if you select a folder, its contents is displayed Configuration Panel - The configuration panel allows you to specify various configuration options for each resource. The type and the purpose of the selected resource determine the contents of the configuration panel.

Process definition


A process definition is the graphical representation of your business process. You develop and test process definitions using TIBCO Designer. The process definition is executed by a TIBCO BusinessWorks process engine. A process engine creates instances of process definitions. These process instances automate your business process.

A process engine creating process instances

Process definitions


It consist of these components -- Activities -- Transition -- Groups -- Shared Configuration Resources -- Sub Processes

Process definitions


Activities are the individual units of work within a process definition. Activities are available on the various palettes within TIBCO Designer. Each palette has a set of activities that can be performed for that palette. Transitions describe the flow of processing within a process definition. A transition is represented by an arrow between two activities. The arrows are unidirectional, and you cannot draw a transition to a previously executed activity. Control flow in a process definition must proceed sequentially beginning with the Start activity (or a process starter) and ending with the End activity

Transitions

Process definitions
 

The following are examples of palettes and some of the activities the palettes contain: File - Create File - Remove File - Write File - Read File FTP - FTP Put - FTP Get JDBC - JDBC Query - JDBC Call Procedure - JDBC Update Mail - Send Mail

Process definitions


Groups - To create sets of activities that are to be repeated. You can repeat the activities once for each item in a list, until a condition is true, or if an error occurs Shared Configuration Resources - are specifications that are shared among activities. These are resources, such as database connections, WSDL files, schema definitions, and connections to other servers Subprocesses - Business processes are often very complex and it is difficult to diagram the complete process in one process definition. You can create several smaller process definitions instead of one monolithic process definition. You can then call each process definition from another process definition, when necessary. When you call a process definition, the called process is known as a subprocess

Process Variables


Process variables are data structures available to the activities within the process. Process variables are displayed in the Process Data panel of each activitys Input tab. There are four types of process variables: - Activity Output - Predefined process variable - Error Process Variable - User Defined Process Variable

XPath


XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for addressing parts of XML documents.
TIBCO BusinessWorks uses XPath (XML Path Language) to specify and process elements of data schema. These data schema are either process variables or input schema for an activity. You can also use XPath to perform basic manipulation and comparison of strings, numbers, and booleans

The XPath formula builder

Testing


TIBCO BusinessWorks provides a testing environment for stepping through your process models and determining the sources of errors. Entering the testing environment starts a TIBCO BusinessWorks engine. The engine starts process instances based on the process definitions stored in your project. You can select one of the running process instances to display in the design panel, and the currently executing activity is highlighted as the process instance runs.