[jboss-dev-forums] [Design of JBoss jBPM] - Re: web console feedback

[david.lloyd@jboss.com]

Here's a list of things that are done and not done, as well as my ranking of how important they are.  You are free to decide what the actual importance is, because I'm not totally clear on your goals for this release (mine are to provide at least minimal functionality without any major crash issues).

Some major things that are done (not an exhaustive list):

1. Generally no on-screen exceptions from regular navigation (I'm squashing them as I find them)
2. New task forms rendering
3. Process source
4. Task form source (just because I had that nice little XML formatter written, so I thought, why not)

Things that need to be done:

1. More work on navigation (I also don't like the mix of action and navigation in the menu).  I could keep busy for several days on this one, but I think it's pretty important.
2. Action feedback - right now, some actions move you to a new view, some keep you on the same view, but none of them give you any feedback to tell you what happened.  I have an idea of how to do this but I'd need a day or two to do it.  This is pretty important from a usability perspective, but maybe not so important if the goal is to just demo the app?
3. Search Filters - should be moved to be inline with the table columns.  Maybe 3-4 hours of work.
4. Reports and Dashboard - Many of the view screens could be enhanced to show simple dashboard-like things, and even keep them updated real-time with relatively small effort.  This would help fill out the content of these screens.  The ones that are there just have a couple attributes that I grabbed more to test the navigation than to provide the final content.  This could range from simple to complex, depending on how fancy I want to get with it.
5. Validation - Validation feedback is primitive right now.  To see what I mean, put a text string such as "hello" in one of the numeric search fields, like process version or task priority.  This is maybe a half-day of work, if I do #2 first.
6. Cosmetic stuff - There's a lot I could do here, and I probably will, eventually, but it's obviously less important.
7. Task Form Outcomes - I'd like to have task form transition buttons bring you to a completion screen for the "next step".  It should tell you if there are tasks outstanding, and to whom they are assigned.  You should be able to choose a task to work on next, and possibly the options should be restricted by security role at some point.  This is more of a design effort than implementation, but my gut feeling is that I'll want to finish fixing up the navigation first, otherwise I'll probably end up redoing some of this after I do the navigation stuff.
8. Robustness - The web application can fail in some places when there is unexpected or incorrect data in the process definition or in the database.  I'd like to be robust against this case and give sensible error messages.  Again this isn't so important from a demonstration perspective - just don't feed it bad data. :-)

My editor actually crashed while I was typing this and so I had to start over again.  Grrr.  I'm sure I left something out.  Feel free to add things you think are important... especially content-related items.  I'm not always sure what the most useful information to display would be.  In many cases, adding content is really simple so feel free to mention anything you can think of.


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