Combining Board Manager with Business Process Workflow

[RIchard Horton]

I've got a workflow I'm setting up (for problems as it happens) where I'm trying to work out the best way of proceeding. 

So far I have got a form to create a Request, and extracted all the info OK. I've also set up a prioritising board with 3 lanes (basically unprioritised, prioritised, done). I've split the Prioritised lane into 3 (for different priority levels) and moved the PRB into the correct sub-lane based on the priority assigned. So far, so good. 

What I want to do now is work out how, once I've assembled a load of problems in the 3 Prioritised sub-lanes, I can most effectively move them up and down the sub-lanes and also to change the priority level if relevant. It would be nice to be able to drag them around on the board and then do a Get Card Info to find out where they have ended up, but I don't think it works like that. 

I could create a looping task that asks where they want to move the priority to until they choose that it's done. I guess I should prompt for a position they want to move to and put that into the Order parameter in Move Card on Board. [As an aside the wiki for this function does not include Lane Column in the list of Options which confused me at first, but fortunately it is there]. I haven't got my head round how the parameters would work here . Presumably one can work out how many positions there are to move to using a Get Lane command and validate using that ? 

Something I am not clear on is how the Get Lane command works when you have (say) 3 sub-lanes. It's not clear from the info given (to me anyway) which of these parameters refers to the lane and which refers to the sub-lane.  It reads like none of them refer to the sub-lane. In that case how do you know what sub-lane you are dealing with ? 

Is this making sense ?! Am I on the right line or overcomplicating it ?

Thanks

Richard

[RIchard Horton]

PS wasn't sure if I should raise this under Board Manager or Service Manager - hopefully someone at Hornbill can sort out it getting flagged appropriately ! 

[TrevorHarris]

Hi,

The getLaneInformation bpm only returns information about the lane and doesn't apply to sub-lanes.  The sub-lanes are numbered in the order they appear in the lane starting from 0, so the first sub-lane is 0 the second is 1, the third 2 etc. so you don't need to get specific info about a sub-lane to be able to move a card into that lane you can just put this number in the lane column attribute.  Unfortunately I don't think its possible to see how many cards are in a specific sub-lane when setting the order but if you put an order value to 0 the card will be moved to the top of that sub-lane, otherwise it will be inserted into the position specified, if the number is greater than the maximum number in that sub-lane it will be positioned at the bottom.

Thanks

Trevor

[RIchard Horton]

So, if I want to move within a sub-lane I think I could take one of these approaches 

1/ move into the lane using the BPM, but then shuffle position on the Board. This movement wouldn't then be reflected in the ticket, but as long as it stays in the same sub-lane would be consistent with the workflow and allow it to proceed. As long as I don't want to see the current position in the ticket then this would be OK. 

2/ scrap using 3 sub-lanes and have 3 lanes. I would then be able to extract/set the position in the lane from the workflow (e.g. a task that says something like 'Your current position is 5. What position would you like to move to ?")

Am I on the rights lines here ? 

Thanks

Richard

[RIchard Horton]

By the way, when working on this I'm trying to set the priority within the workflow based on a choice made (rather than relying on using the escalation option, which maybe I should really be doing). To do this I can use the Update Request>Priority Automation, but to do that I need to be able to look up the UID corresponding to the priority level selected. I couldn't see anything on the Wiki telling me how to do that. Could you point me in the right direction ...

[RIchard Horton]

I scrapped using sub-lanes as I want to be able to extract the present the information that is in the board differently. 

I have set a task in the workflow to ask what position you want to move the task to. I'm not validating that at the moment. If I set 3 tickets all to be in position 1 in turn,  it seems to put the position number to 1 for all 3 (ie when I do a get Card Info after moving it, which makes sense) . What I'd like is a way of translating that into the position it actually is on the board ie  1, 2, and 3 in this case. In this case it is about the changes that happen to the tickets that have been usurped in position 1. 

I'm not sure whether it's feasible to do this (ie to update other tickets to say what their new position is based on another ticket being pushed above them a BP task in that other ticket). If it isn't next best would, I think, to be able to do an extract from the board. What tables would I need to be working with for such a report ?

I want to make the board information available to an audience which doesn't have access to the Board Manager (and never will) which is one reason why I'm trying to do this. The other is that I'm sending ticket information into another system from within the workflow and want to be able to give meaningful information about a ticket's position on the board

Does that make sense ?

[SamS]

Hi @RIchard Horton,

Behind the scenes, the Board Manager boards are located in the h_boardmanager_board, h_boardmanager_lanes, and h_boardmanager_card tables.

There are no triggers that fire on modification of a card on the board, with exception of the Webhooks which would require a middle layer/glue application that you would need to create yourself - and it is a little overkill as ALL movement for ALL cards on ALL boards will trigger and not just the "few cards" you are interested in.