Visual programming of business processes

The Russian market has entered a stage when all customers want to develop their information systems independently, without any use of integrators and vendors. For modern systems of economic documentation, visual editors of business processes, as well as document cards, have become very popular. Visual programming, or rather its main idea, originated in the eighties, but so far the active development and development of various products in various fields is proceeding. As a result of their use, the following thesis is increasingly confirmed: the higher the level of the product is used, the greater the limitations imposed on implementation. This fact has a lot of consequences for Russian EDS systems. Let's look at a list of typical queries that most often cause changes:

- creating new documents or changing existing ones - this is done on the server side;

- a description of the list of possible actions over assignments and documents (user interface, task cards);

- work with document types;

- reference books.

Visual programming: working with a visual editor

When it comes to creating cards and linking them to specific description fields, it becomes necessary to work with the editor, which in turn must support a very specific set of functions:

- description of the procedure for selecting values from directories with a convenient interface and the possibility of filtering;

- breakdown of the card into logical partitions. For example, separate bookmarks for information fields, for the history of the document, for the route, for related orders and other things;

- support for the insertion of records, which may contain references to some extraneous objects. For example, a record in the review history should refer to another entry, a visa, entries in other fields should also be referring to some objects;

There must be a possibility of describing the relationships between different fields;

- the ability to edit hierarchical structures is another important detail that visual programming should make available;

- a description of the relationships that are formed between the fields, that is, an indication of which fields for which documents will be available for editing;

- setting the visibility of the fields, depending on what conditions are set;

- complex versions of data validation in combination with several fields.

There is still no suitable solution for the formation of web interfaces with similar capabilities.

Visual programming: work with a description of business processes

Manufacturers of various systems are constantly working on the creation of various visual editors of processes. When using such editors to develop Russian systems, programmers are faced with a whole range of problems. Many practices that are widely used in Russian document circulation can not be described in terms of business processes, which is why a visual programming language is difficult to use. Working with Russian document management is so complicated that it is now impossible to do as it is done abroad, that is, to create forms that work interconnected, rather than calling each time forms and documents necessary for solving one task. This approach does not allow increasing the efficiency of work. If you try to visualize those processes that are well suited to this, then such investments will not pay off, since these processes do not need to be changed frequently.

There is a certain set of tasks for which it is appropriate to use visual programming C, and in other cases it can not even be touched.