About Process Apps

Process apps are containers for applications and orchestrations that address specific business requirements. Process apps, applications, and orchestrations are designed in SBM Composer. For more information about designing process apps, refer to the SBM Composer Guide.

Application Repository enables you to deploy and promote process apps to an SBM Application Engine server. To see process apps in Application Repository so that you can deploy or promote them, you must be assigned the privilege to view the process app.

There are several ways process apps are added to the repository:

• Publish the process app from SBM Composer. When you publish a process app, the process app is checked in to the repository.
• Load the process app from a file in to the repository. The file is created when a designer exports the process app from SBM Composer. When the file is loaded in Application Repository, it is stored in the repository. If the process app already exists in the repository, a new version of the process app is created.
• Import the process app from a solution file provided by Serena Software, Inc.
• Get the process app from the SBM Application Engine server. Application Repository takes all the components in the running process app and stores them in the repository. If the process app already exists in the repository, a new version of the process app is created.

Application Repository versions each process app in the repository sequentially. The first time a process app is stored in the repository, it becomes version 1. Each time a process app is updated in the repository, Application Repository increments the version number by one.

In SBM Composer, designers assign a label to a process app when they publish it. Likewise, you can assign a label when you load a file or get the process app from the SBM Application Engine server. The label can be any string by which you want to identify the process app version; for example, "v1.0" or "beta release". In Application Repository, you see the assigned label when you select a specific process app and view the Versions sub-tab. In this way, for example, you see that version 6 of the process app is the "beta release".

When you publish a process app from SBM Composer, the process app blueprint and all the design elements are labeled so that you can later recreate the process app as it was at any previous time. You can use this feature to patch old versions of the process app, for example, or to create read-only copies of the process app as it was at a certain point in time.