Difference between Coaches & Coach Views in IBM BPM

Introduction:

Welcome to the introduction to Coaches and Coach Views in IBM® Business Process Manager. This article describes Coaches and Coach Views at the conceptual level, demonstrating the relationship between them.

Overview

Coaches

Coaches are the user interfaces for human services.

There are two types of user interfaces for human services:

ü  Task completion

ü  Stand-alone service.

To build either type of user interface for human services, you use coaches.

When a coach is a stand-alone service, such as a dashboard user interface, users can run it as at any time. Users access it through the Process Portal. For information about dashboards, see Dashboards in Process Portal. Users can also access it as a WebSphere® portlet.

When a coach is a task completion user interface, it is part of the human service flow. When the flow enters the coach, the user sees the user interface that is defined for that coach. The user interface consists of HTML code that is displayed in a web browser. The flow leaves the coach when a boundary event occurs. A coach can have multiple exit flows with each one associated with a different boundary event.

Coaches contain one or more coach views. The coach views provide the user interface elements and layout for the coach. Each coach view can contain one or more other coach views, which creates a parent-child relationship between these coach views. At run time, the parent coach view is rendered as a <div></div> tag that contains a nested <div></div> tag for each child coach view. Each coach view can also have a binding to a business object, CSS code to control its visual layout, and JavaScript to define its behavior.

Coach views

Coach views are reusable sets of user interfaces that users use to interact with a business object or service. Coach views can consist of one or more other coach views, data bindings, layout instructions, and behaviors.

Because coach views are reusable, each coach view instance can share parts of its user interface with other coach view instances within a coach. For example, you create a coach that contains a coach view instance that includes a set of address fields. If you create a second coach that needs the same address fields, you can reuse the same coach view. In both cases, the coach is using an instance of the coach view. You can edit the properties of each instance independently. For example, changing the label of one coach view instance does not change the label of the other. Both coach view instances use a reference to point to the coach view definition. This approach means that if the coach view definition changes, you can see the change reflected in the instances of the coach view.

You can create a coach view in the process application or in a toolkit. In general, create highly reusable coach views in toolkits and more specialized coach views in process applications. Choosing the process application means that you can reuse it only within the process application. However, it also means that if someone edits the coach view, the changes apply to the instances of the coach view in the process application. If the coach view is in a toolkit and then someone edits it, the changes could apply to all instances of the coach view in all applications that use that version of the toolkit. Because editing a coach definition can affect many instances, be careful in your changes. For example, deleting a content box in the coach view definition could mean that coaches or coach views that contain instances of that coach view cannot display the content that they had defined in that content box.

You cannot directly edit the definition of the coach view from within the parent coach or coach view. Instead, you must open the coach view definition first before you can change it. When you open a coach view definition to edit it, you can see the following pages:

ü  The Overview page displays the coach view name, information about the coach view, the images used to represent the coach view during design time, and how the coach view is used. You can also tag your coach view to make it easier to find in the library and on the palette.

ü  The Behavior page displays the JavaScript code and CSS files implementation of the coach view. The page also contains inline JavaScript and style code. The Behavior page is also where you define event handler code. The event handlers are the entry points for the code of the coach view. While the coach view might reference supporting JavaScript files, the event handlers contain the functions that the IBM® Business Process Manager framework calls.

ü  The Variables page displays the interfaces to the coach view, which include the business data binding, the configuration options (including Ajax services), and the localization resources that are available to or are used by the coach view.

ü  The Layout page displays the coach views and controls contained within the coach view and their relative positions. The layout page also displays the palette, which contains items that you can add to the coach view. These items consist of other coach views, advanced items, and variables. When you select a coach view or control in the layout, you see its properties.

Controls are coach views. IBM BPM provides a set of stock controls on the palette. In terms of use, IBM BPM treats the stock controls and the custom coach views that you create identically.

Difference between Coach & Coach views

Coach	Coach View
Coaches are the web-based user interfaces that provide process-related data to Process Portal users and collect input from the users.	A Coach View is a reusable unit that you use in Coaches and other Coach Views.
We can see the flow of the Coaches on the Diagram page of the human service.	A Coach View generally defines the user interface for a particular type of data, giving you the potential to customize the user interface by specifying the configuration options.
Coaches are implemented in human services, which manage the flow from one Coach to another.	We can use Coach Views to lay out other Coach Views.
Coached can be developed under Process App only.	Coach Views that are provided in the Coaches toolkit are called stock controls.
Coaches are like user interface can be seen on screen once we run it.	Everything under Views in the palette is a Coach View.
We can edit the properties of each Coach instance independently or dependent.	We must edit the properties of each Coach View instance independently.
We can’t set the visibility of Coach.	We can set the visibility of Coach Views.

Conclusion

This article we covered Coaches and Coach Views at the conceptual level, demonstrating the relationship between them. I have described difference between Coaches and Coach Views.

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