Business Process Management

For a simple transition from step A to step B you can easily draw a line between two steps. That works very well with both products. A more interesting use case to look at is a conditional transition.

Therefore I have added a gateway in my HelloWorld Example which is supposed to decide whether the process has to continue towards the human task 'UserConfirmation' or whether the process execution can go straight to the end step.

The condition is simple. After persisting the text which was passed to the process start step, the gateway step has to decide this: 

If the text equals 'HelloWord' then continue to the end step, otherwise go to the 'UserConfirmation' step, where a user has to confirm or change the text.

First let's have a look at how to implement this in Intalio Designer:

In the Mapper-tab of the gateway step, you can edit the condition. Therefore you open the view 'Mapper Palette' and choose the desired operators and functions. And Intalio really offers a lot of them.

You drag and drop an operator or function into the middle column of the mapper view. Afterward, you can assign values to the input parameters by drawing lines from variables in the left column. In the graph, I have marked the operator and function in the mapper palette, which I chose to implement the HelloWorld example.

Now, let's have a look how you can implement the same functionality in webMethods Designer.

In the properties view of the gateway, you can implement conditions on parameter values which are in the pipeline of the process. This is fairly simple, because webMethods offers only some basic operators and functions. That makes it even easier to implement a condition, compared to Intalio, but works only for some standard use cases. 

If you have a more complex condition, then you have to implement it in a service which is called prior to the gateway step. This services has to put the result of the evaluated condition into the process pipeline. The gateway is then able to evaluate this result with its basic operator.

Conclusion:

On this topic, Intalio is a step ahead of webMethods, because it offers more functions and operators. Of course, the higher functionality has the handicap of a higher complexity for implementation. But after you have tried it out one time, you wouldn't have problems with the good drawing procedure for implementing the conditions in Intalio.