Actors make the scene

Blog
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BOS 6.0 will completely revise how to define who is responsible for performing a given task (or set of tasks.

The term actor in Bonita Open Solution 6.0 represents a group of individuals authorized or assigned to perform specific tasks in the process, for example: Sales employees.

There will be three steps to completely define actors and their assignment to user tasks:

1.Define actors at the process (pool) level.

2.Define lanes to represent functional groups. Choose an actor for each lane. A lane or task can have only a single actor, but you still have the option to change the actor for a specific task(s) in a lane,

3.Map the actor to the organization.

An organization consists of:

  • Groups: a subunit of an organization (for example: Sales, R&D, Services, Marketing)
  • Roles: a function in a group (for example: websalesperson, developer, tester, manager, consultant)
  • Users: an individual (for example, James)
For example, the actor Sales employees might be defined and assigned to a set of sales tasks. Depending on how the organization has been defined, Sales employees might then be mapped to the group Sales which in turn has a set of individual users assigned to it. Or, it could be mapped to the role websalesperson, which in turn has a set of individual users assigned to it. Or, as shown in this example, Sales employees might simply be mapped directly to a set of individual users.

(And no worries about being sure the organization is 100% correct – it can be changed in Bonita User Experience, where you can add or edit users, groups, and roles. That’s pretty cool, and very very useful in the real world of changing organizational structures.)

Mapping the actor to an organization is done when the process is configured (the last step before you can run from Bonita Studio or export it for execution).

At runtime, the set of individual users mapped to the actor will be assigned to the task.