IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Create processes in IBM Process Designer > Debug processes with the Inspector
Stepping through a process
Step through process execution to ensure that your BPD works as expected.
When you run a process, you can step through the execution to ensure that your business process definition works as expected.
You can use this functionality for team playbacks and to help debug your process.
To learn more about the Inspector interface before you begin, see Inspector reference.
Procedure
- Open a business process definition in IBM Process Designer.
- To view instances running on a different server or to view instances for a different version of the BPD, select a different server or snapshot from the drop-down menus in the toolbar.
Important: Remote Process Servers must be connected to your Process Center to be available. See Customize the Process Server connection settings to learn how to connect to remote Process Servers. To run a process on a different server using the Inspector, first deploy the process application snapshot that contains the process that you want to run as described in Deploying snapshots to a process server . If you click the Run icon while All versions is selected from the list of snapshots, the Inspector runs the most recent snapshot of the BPD on the Process Center Server. For remote Process Servers, the snapshots available are limited to the snapshots that are deployed on that server.
- Click the Run button in the upper right corner.
- When IBM BPM prompts you to change to the Inspector interface, click Yes.
Select the check box if you want IBM Process Designer to change interfaces without prompting for approval.
- In the Process Instances tab, click the new or received task and then click the Run button. In some cases, you might need to select a user account or provide a password for a specific user account in order to run a task. This is controlled by lane assignments and routing for activities. See Assigning participant groups to lanes and Assigning activities for more information.
- Complete the task when it runs.
For example, if the task generates a Coach, enter requested values and complete the form. When the task is complete, you return to the Inspector.
- Click the Refresh icon in the toolbar. The Inspector shows the progress by moving the token to the next step in both the diagram and the navigation tree.
If your BPD includes an attached timer event, you can right-click the timer event token in the navigation tree and select Fire Timer to trigger the event.
- You can expand subprocesses, event subprocesses, and linked processes as you step through their contents by double-clicking on the activity in the diagram view. Even if you do not expand a subprocess activity, you still step through activities contained in the subprocess.
- To see the variables passed from step to step, click the process node in the navigation tree.
- Right-click a variable and then click Show in Execution Evaluator.
The Inspector opens the Execution Evaluator tab and shows the values for the parameters within the selected variable.
You can use the Execution Evaluator to inspect the variable values as they change through the flow of the business process definition.
You can also manipulate variables in the Execution Evaluator using JavaScript expressions to validate your process implementation. To do so, enter the JavaScript expression and click the Run icon at the top of the Evaluator. The results are displayed in the bottom pane of the tab.
- In the Process Instances tab, click the task for the next step, and then click the Run task icon.
- Click the Refresh icon in the toolbar. You can tell that the business process definition is complete when the final step has a status of Closed and there are no active tokens in the diagram or navigation tree.