Coach views

Coach views are reusable sets of user interfaces that users use to interact with a business object or service. Coach views can comprise one or more sets of 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.

Considerations for IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere

With IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere (IBM RPA), repetitive tasks in IBM BPM processes can be automated and expedited by using bots. To enable an efficient interaction with the IBM RPA bots, the following enhancements were made to the IBM BPM coach framework.

Coach support for IBM RPA

To develop reliable user interfaces that IBM RPA bots can use, you must provide a stable and predictable identification of coach views in your coaches. To ensure that, when you develop your coaches and coach views in the web Process Designer, use the context.controlidpath property that is available in the context JavaScript API object. See The coach view context object.

The context.controlidpath property uniquely identifies a coach view instance within a coach. It remains stable through most coach layout changes and can be used as a base to create unique IDs for DOM elements in the implementation of the coach view. For example, it can tolerate changes such as new content added to the coach, content moved around inside the coach, for example, between sections and layout widgets, or changes to field labels.

Both the BPM UI toolkit and the Responsive Coaches toolkit are enhanced to use the improved framework. No support for IBM RPA is provided for the coach views in the Coaches toolkit.

Coach development tips

To facilitate the automation of tasks in IBM RPA, keep in mind the following points when you develop your IBM BPM coaches and coach views:

• Use context.controlidpath as the base string for HTML IDs within the DOM structure of your coach views. For example, when you build a Text coach view, you might want to give your label DOM element the ID text-label-<controlidpath> and the input element the ID text-input-<controlidpath>.
• Apply the unique identification to all the DOM elements with which the user might want to interact in an RPA task, including the following elements:
  • Form-style fields
  • Read-only information that might be used by the task, for example, text that might be copied by the task for some purpose
  • Page navigation fields, such as Tab controls
• To verify that a control works well with the IBM RPA bots, record the interactions using the RPA Smart Recorder, and ensure that the captured HTML IDs are the expected ones, as described earlier. Iterate through recording, playback, and HTML ID assignment until all the interaction elements have stable IDs.
  Note: Users might still need to make minor adjustments to the recorded objects to optimize the playback, but the adjustments should be limited to simple changes such as changing keystroke delays, removing captured properties, and so on.

For more information about IBM RPA, see the IBM Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere V10.0 documentation.