BPMN Editor – Document a Workflow
What You Will Learn
After finishing this tutorial, you will be able to provide documentation for your workflows.
1. Prerequisites
To complete this guide you need:
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Roughly 10 minutes
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The PAK Bpmn Editor ( Download )
2. Building your Workflow
First you will need to build a workflow following one of these guides:
or you can open an existing workflow.
3. Document the workflow
A user might not know what a workflow does. Give them a small explanation of what they can expect to happen when they run the workflow or explain its use case.
3.1. Add Documentation
To add documentation simply click on the documentation tab in the tab view where you can also find the dataflow analysis, datastore and key consumption.
| 1 | Select this tab to open a text area containing the documentation of the workflow. Any already existing documentation should be shown in this tab. |
| 2 | Click into the text area to edit the documentation. |
4. How to provide good documentation
To write a good documentation you need to understand what questions the user asks about the workflow.
Some of them might be:
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What does the workflow do?
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What can I do with this workflow?
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What are the use cases of this workflow?
| Generally it is a good practice to think about what the user wants to know. |
| Try to keep the documentation short and simple! |
4.1. Summarize the workflow
A short summary of the workflow provides the user with a short and quick overview of what this workflow does.
4.2. Application of your workflow
Most of the time the use case or application is also represented by the name of the workflow. However, a complex task might be to long to put into a name. You can elaborate the workflows task in the documentation.
4.3. User instructions
Some workflows require the user to perform manual tasks or inputs. Give some instruction about the user task or give some information what the input is used for.
| The user might need some additional instructions about more complex tasks or wants to know what he needs to enter as input. |
4.4. Using HTML for advanced documentation
The workflow executor also provides some HTML support for the documentation. The guide about command documentation contains all relevant information about how you can use HTML tags in your documentation for workflows.