Introduction to the Designers

Overview

Decisions has graphical workspaces called Designers that allow users to create various business logic for processes, display information to a customer, show collected information in the form of a report, and much more. 

Flow Designer

The Flow Designer allows users to create or edit Flows. A Flow is a logical process made with visual components called Steps to achieve an automated result. These steps can be configured with user-defined inputs, outputs, and other step-specific configurable properties. Flows are most commonly created from scratch, but templates are available for this Designer element as well. It is necessary to have an understanding of how the desired process should work, what systems will be used, who the end-user is, and the expected results before building a Flow. 

Form Designer

The Forms Designer allows users to create interactable Forms. Forms are usable within Flows and Pages and commonly used to allow users to enter or view information. The Form Designer builds pure HTML forms and offers various different layouts to build on. The Form Designer is extensible, using a Javascript-based API to provide additional user controls. The Forms can be hosted either within decisions or direct links from outside systems or embedded into outside-based web systems.

Forms not only can operate as a user interface on the front-end, but they also receive user input that passes as data through Flow steps. Forms do not serve a logistical purpose if not contained in a Flow on the back-end. Even if a Form is configured with places for a user to enter information, the Form is not live, and data is not moving unless it is called from a step in a Flow. 

Report Designer

The Report Designer allows Decisions to have the ability to aggregate and view data in a consumable way. Using reporting and dashboards, data can be reported inside and outside Decisions in the same environment. All reports have the ability to have action context established on them; actions can be made on data from within a dashboard.

Page/Dashboard Designer

An excellent way to display data outside of a Form or Report is through a Page. The Page Designer uses a similar layout to Form Designers and allows administrators to put multiple data-reporting pieces together to create a Dashboard. Pages allow the user to view and interact with data that is not currently moving through a Flow. All user interface elements are style-able via .CSS or .LESS files to conform to corporate styles.

Rule Designer

The Rule Designer allows users to create various business Rules. Rules are conditional logic crafted via if/then/else statements (Statement Rule) or more dense Rule types like Truth Tables and Matrix Rules. Flows can tie Rules together and provide states in a long-running transaction. Rules can be called via API and combined into composite units called Rule Sets, which allow users to have a number of Rules to provide a much more complex answer to a problem.