Petals View : User Guide

Petals View 's main menu (leftpanel) is composed of three main sections:

• Flow Supervision: allows monitoring of ongoing or finished flows, either on a global view of all flows, or a more detailed view of one flow type (pre-requires referential import).
• Referential: this section's menus are used to define the flows in their different levels: steps, parameters, success/error messages, referential import/export.
• Administration: allows to define application's users and roles.

On first launch of the application, you must use login: admin and password: admin

Administration

Roles management

Petals View is provided with an out-of-the-box role: ''admin''. This role is omnipotent, and cannot be renamed or changed. Only its access rights can be modified.

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To create a new role, click on the "create role" button to get the following screen:

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Here you have to  :

• Type in your new role's name
• Choose its access rights:
            Managing flow supervision: with this checked, the role can access all of the Flow Supervision menu.
            Managing Referential: with this checked, the role can access all of the Referential menu: view, create, modify, import and export referentials.
            Managing Users: with this checked, role can consult, create and modify Petals View's roles and users.

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• Clicking on the "Submit" button will save the new role and automatically get you to its view/modification screen (you can also access this screen by clicking on the referential name when viewing list of roles).

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Role viewing/edition screen is composed of two tabs:

• Identity card: here you'll find all information provided during role creation. You can change its by clicking on "Modify".
• Users list: you can define here which users will be associated with this role. To add a user, click on "Add". To delete one, click on "Delete".

Manage users

One user is provided out-of-the-box: ''admin''. This user has the "admin" role by default so it has full access to the application. He cannot be renamed nor deleted, but you can modify its password and roles.

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To create a new user, click on "Create user" and you'll get on the following screen:

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Here define its login id and password.

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Clicking on "Submit" will save the new user and take you to its View/Edition screen. You can later access this page by clicking on the user's name in the users list.

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This user's viewing/edition screen is composed of two tabs:

• Identity card: here are listed all informations provided during user's creation. To modify its, just click on "Change password" (to change login password) or "Modify" (to change other information).
• List of roles: you can define here what are the roles associated with that user. To add a role, click on "Add", to delete one, click on "Delete".

User management with CAS

Petals View can be easily connected to a CAS server to bebefit from single sign on capabilities.
See [this page] for more information about CAS integration.

Referential management

The Referential section is the place to define the flow types: steps, parameters, error/success messages... And to import/export referentials.
For this part, we'll suppose you already have generated a flow, that was saved in the database, by following the tutorial example.

Creation of a new flow type

Clicking on "Referential management" item of the "Referential menu" opens a screen showing, in a table, all the flow types detected in the application. If no flow has been saved in database yet, you'll see the following screen:

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Here you can click on "ADD" to create a new flow type by following further instructions of this user guide.
If flows have been already saved in the database, without associated referentials, you'll get the following screen:

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Here we don't have any yet, only one "Unknown" type. Click on it to get this screen:

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With this method, the "Type" field is automatically filled in to match the flow in the database. You can't therefore change it. (If you created a referential "from scratch", you'd have to fill in the field yourself, and ensure the number you type doesn't interfere with another flow type).
The "Name" field is manatory, fill it in (preferably with a human-readable name) to be able to create the referential.

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Click on "Create" to save the new flow type and automatically get the screen to further configure/modify it.

Viewing/Edition of a flow type

This screen can also be accessed by clicking on the flow type name in flow types list.

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On this screen you can see: 

• Its General informations, namely its "Type" (non-editable) and name (editable, as long as it is an unique one).
• The Global functional fields of this flow type, associated to the steps in which they are defined.
• The list of "unknown" steps associated to our flow (NB: if you create a flow type "from scratch", you won't get this table).
• The Steps that you already configured. Click on "Add" to create new steps to add steps not yet saved in the database, or if you had created the referential "from scratch". 
• Flows deletion rules : Here, you must configure the number of days from which you want to remove flows. If you don't specify the number of days, and you click delete from view by type of flow, you will delete all flows of this type.
  

To configure an unknown step, click on it, for example the first one, to get the following screen:

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• The "Functional name" is mandatory, it's the human-readable name that you want yo give to your step. 
• The "Interface name" field is mandatory, it has to be filled in with the name of the JBI interface name of your step. Here, it's been automatically filled in since informations were saved in the database. If you want to add a step from scratch, you'll have to fill it in.
• The "Service Name" is also mandatory, and has to be filled in with your step's JBI Service Name. Here, it has also been automatically filled in, except if you created a new step from scratch.
• The "Start flow?" and "End flow" boxes let you define whether this step is the first one and/or the last one of a processus.
• What message will be displayed when step is successfully finished
• What message will be displayed if step failed and returned an error. Default message will be used if the returned error code isn't referenced.

You can also modify an already configured step by clicking on its name in the table.

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On this screen, you can modify the general informations. Note that the associated parameters are numbered. If you see a 0, that means no parameters have been associated with the step in the database yet.
To add a functional field (parameter of the processus) click on "Add" button of the "Functional fields" table.

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By default, to avoid interference with already defined parameters, the "Index" field of this screen will have a value defined by adding 1 to the last existing one. For example, if four functional fields were already defined (index 0, 1, 2, 3), the filled in value will be 4 (first available value).
If the user deliberately fills in a value already used, the new functional field will be inserted with this number, while all subsequents fields will see their values incremented by one, to avoid interference.
Another field is the "Global" checkbox. If you check it, this parameter will be viewable in step view as well as in general view of a flow type's instance.
You can also modify a functional field's name by clicking on it, or suppress some by ticking their checkboxes then click on "Delete".
You can add custom error messages by click on "Add" button of error table.

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An error is an code (>0 integer), accompanied with informations on it, sent when a step fail. You can also modify an existing error message by clicking on its code in erorr tables. Finally you can delete error messages by ticking the checkboxes then click on "Delete" button.

Delete a flow referential

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On this page, you can delete identified (configured) flow types by checking the corresponding boxes in the table then clicking on "Delete" button.

Export a Referential

This feature allows you to export a referential an then import it in any Petals View instance. This is mainly useful to quickly set up a production environment by reusing configurations made on development instance.
To export a referential, just check the boxes of the one(s) you want to export then click on "Export" button.

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Import a Referential

This feature allows you to import a referential that you previously exported. This screen is composed of two tabs:

• Import data by URL: provide an absolute url.
• Import data by file: browse your computer to select the adequate .xml file.

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Flow Supervision 

This part of Petals View allows visualization of daily flows instances, either ongoing or finished. You can see them either from a global view (all flows from all flow types) or from a view focused on one flow type.
When clicking on "Global View", a screen appears with a list of all ongoing/finished flows.

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Default behaviour only lists daily flows (if their starting date is identified).
You can filter the view by selecting a period of time applying on starting date ("after the" and/or "before the").
You can also filter the view by flow status or flow type, thanks to the dropdown menus located in table header.

• "See all flows" buttons makes Petals View displays any and all flows, including the unknown ones, without any time limitation
• "Refresh" button allows to update the table to check latest flows.
• "Export" button exports the table you see on the screen in CSV (the separation of the results is ";").

To analyse a flow in detail, click on its instance identifier (the number) in the table.

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A new screen arrives, displaying, in addition to general information of the flow, the different steps and their status. This allows easy diagnosis of the causes of a processus failure. Global functional fields and their values are also displayed.
"Refresh" button updates this screen with latest infos.
Clicking on a step brings you a detailed dynamic view of this step:

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Finally, you can display all flows of a chosen type by clicking on its name in the "Flow supervision" menu of left panel.

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• All editing, filtering refreshing and exporting features are the same as in Global view, with added possibility to filter view by a parameter.
• Click on "Delete" to remove all flows of this type, which are older than the number of days defined in the referential ("Days before deletion: x")

If you have a large quantity of flows in your database that you want to delete, this operation can take several minutes.

This deletion feature can be used through a webservice (removeOldFlow(int type)). You can combine it with another exposed method, getAllFlowReferentialType(), which returns a list of each refernetial type's integer. This allows you to easily delete old flows for any/all types. These two methods can be used if you want to set up an automatic deletion process flows.