How to create Information links for TIBCO ActiveMatrix® BPM Event Collector

Objective

Following the steps of this easy tutorial, you will be able to create two Information links on a TIBCO Spotfire^® Server, allowing you to connect to the main Event Collector tables: EC_WI_STATUS and EC_PE_STATUS, and add the two as data sources from a TIBCO Spotfire Client or Web Analysis.

The tutorial will use the following software versions: TIBCO ActiveMatrix^® BPM 4.1 and TIBCO Spotfire 7.6, both configured on MS SQL SERVER 2012 database. If you are using different versions of these products or a different database, you can still follow the same principles and work it out.

Pre-requisites

We assume that you have: 

• ActiveMatrix BPM Server installed 

• Access to the ActiveMatrix BPM schema

• TIBCO Spotfire Server installed and running

• TIBCO Spotfire Analyst installed

Instructions

Here are the step by step instructions to follow.

Setup a Data Source

In this sep we will configure a new Data Source to be able to connect to ActiveMatrix BPM Database (using JDBC driver already provided by Spotfire Server

• Log into Spotfire Analyst, connected to your Spotfire Server.
• Click on Tools->Information Designer
• Click on "Setup Data Source"
• Enter the connection details of your ActiveMatrix BPM Database (Driver Type, Connection URL, username, password)

  

   

• Save you Data Source under Elements (you can create a folder structure, in the example below I created a Folder called AMXBPM and save the Data Source under).

  

• Test your data source: Go to the "Data Source" tab on the left panel, and open/unfold the data source until you see the list of AMXBPM tables (AMXBPM Data Source -> bpm -> amxbpm)

  

Create the information links

• Navigate using your newly create data source, to the table named "ec_wi_status"
• Right-click on the ec_wi_status table and select "Create default Information Model"

  

• Save the Information link, for example in the same folder created before, by selecting "AMXBPM" folder and click "OK". Optionally you can enter a description.
• Repeat the same steps as above and create a default information model for ec_pe_status. Later, you can also use the same technique to add more of the Event Collector (EC) tables.

  The structure under "Elements" should now look like this. One line for each Information Model and one folder containing as many entries as columns in the ec tables.

  

• Close Information Designer popup window

Test the information links

Now the information links are available for use in visualizations, we are going to create a new analysis, add them and start visualizing our work items and process instances.

• From Spotfire Analyst client, select "Add Data Tables"
• Click on "Add" then "Information Link"

   

• Locate  and select the "ec_wi_status" element that you just created. Click "OK"
• Your Data table is then added to the analysis and you are presented with the "Recommendation" feature that allow you to select the attributes you are inteested in adding in your visualization, and the tool will help you build the best visualization, depending on your actual data. In order to see data in your visualizaitons, of course you need to have work items created in your ActiveMatrix BPM server. 

  

  For example, select the following 3 attributes: activity_name, process_name and status then as you do your selection the recommendation proposes you different visualizations.

  

• Add the ec_pe_status to your analysis by repeating the last 2 steps.

Optional: Create a relationship between the two data sources

ec_pe_status contains information about process instances (Processes), while ec_wi_status contains information about work items (Tasks). 

There is an obvious relationship between the two: each Task belongs to a process instances. 

To add the relationship in your analysis file:

• make sure both ec_wi_status and ec_pe_status are added to your analysis in Spotfire Analyst
• Click on Edit->Data Table Properties and then click on the "Relations" tab

  

•  Click on "Manage Relations"
• Select "ec_pe_status" in the combo box. We will be adding a relationship to that table.
• Click on "New"
• Configure the left side by selecting the "process_instance" attribute, and the right side by selecting the "process_instance" attribute too (they both have the same name in the two data tables)

  

• Click on OK, then OK, then OK again. You're done!
• To test the new relation, for example:
  • add two visualizations of type "Table" containing both ec_pe_status and ec_wi_status.
  • click on one line of ec_wi_status, and see the corresponding line of ec_pe_status in selected.
  • you can also select one line of ec_pe_status and see potentially zero or multiple lines selected in ec_wi_status, corresponding to the the number of tasks open or completed yet on the instance you selected.

    

Summary

With what you have just learnt, you now can connect Spotfire to ActiveMatrix BPM event Collector tables, in a few minutes.

You can now start focusing on the analysis and visualizations of your processes and tasks !

Here is an example of such analysis with those two tables.