PCF Control 3: Sub Business Process Flow

Introduction:

Business Process Flows (BPF) is one of the salient features that are available in Dynamics 365 but it doesn’t have a provision to capture the sub-stages involved within a single stage, it can have various fields as steps but what if we can have a sub-business process flow that gives wide range of designs to give a better UX rather than an option set or checkbox.

This Sub-Business Process Flow control lets you capture the sub-stages with a fluid transition, let’s you to have different styles for the stages, you can skip the stages, align the stages in a different direction like vertical & horizontal etc.  Well technically, it’s a UI rich transition control, doesn’t have any OOB BPF features but the workflow, plugins or any actions can be triggered on change of this since it overlays on an optionset field.  

• Sub BPF inside BPF stage – It is more appropriate to have this sub-BPF within the BPF stage itself, right now there is no provision to add custom control inside BPF stage through the editor, trying this functionality requires working with XML—Microsoft recommends that only technical users use it at this time. Read more about how to set this up in this detailed step-by-step walkthrough.  I tried and I’m having some issues while reimporting the solution, will resolve it and update.
• Sub BPF inside the form – can be added either in the form and shown/hidden the appropriate sub-BPF based on the main BPF using business rules or

Designs available: below are the 5 designs available for now.

Sources:

GitHub: https://github.com/jeevarajan04/PCF-Sub-Business-Process-Flow

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyWjpRwrsGc

Business Process Flow:

Folks who have worked with Microsoft Dynamics 365 knows well that helps the business.

• Provides a visual indication of where we are in a process.
• Gives users a guide to what should be done at each stage.
• Works consistently across all interfaces, including tablet app.
• Can provide actions that are required to complete before the process can be moved to the next stage—good for things like approvals.
• Can tie two or more entities in the same process together

Noticeable business process flows that comes OOB are

• Lead to Opportunity Sales Process
• Opportunity Sales Process
• Phone to Case Process

Below is the Lead to Opportunity Sales Proces, as you can see it has the stages which can be customized and the steps within each stage, to refer more about, refer Microsoft docs here,  BPF.

I got what you are thinking, “Enough bragging about BPF, we all know what BPF is, show me how it is done” (read with sore throat :P)

Sub Business Process Flow:

Sample Scenario for sub-business process flow:

Let’s say, for example, to Qualify a lead, the salesperson has to track whether the prospect has

1. Prospect has read the email that was sent
2. Prospect has replied back to the email
3. Clicking the link and opened the website, maybe homepage or products page etc. And then closed the website
4. Finally, let’s say the prospect has navigated to the products page, then went to the services page, then to the pricing page, then to the testimonials page, etc. this means the interest is even deeper

Configurable properties:

• The number of stages – depends on the number of options in the optionset field on which the control is rendered.
• Text of each stage – depends on the text of the options in the optionset field.
• Style – different styles that are supported by Material UI.

Steps:

1. Create an option set field, create options that need to be displayed as your stages in sub-BPF.
2. Open the field from the form, navigate to properties
3. Configure the design of the sub-BPF, currently, it supports 5 designs
4. Modifying the options in optionset will change the stages automatically

Designs:

1. Linear Basic Bar
2. Linear Basic Dotted
3. Linear Basic Customized
4. Vertical
5. NonLinear (alert style stages)

Advantages:

1. Different designs
2. Provision to highlight or alert message as a stage
3. Either can skip steps or can complete all the stages at click if not needed.
4. The vertical design of stages

Limitations:

• To have a sub-BPF within the BPF stage itself, solution XML needs changing —Microsoft recommends that only technical users use it at this time. Read more about how to set this up in this detailed step-by-step walkthrough.
• Below is a sample of how the custom control looks within the BPF stage.

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