Animate Business Process Using Animacian

Starting from VP Suite 3.4 Service Pack 1, we support a brand new feature for business process modeling, called Animacian. Animacian is a tool to help you make a process design active by presenting the flow in animation form. This can make your design more attractive by animating it. Besides, you can control the flow of animation yourself to help demonstrating your work to client with your annotation. Moreover, it helps validating your business process by listing out the valid and invalid execution paths. Finally, it calculates all possible paths for your business process, making the result of process evaluation more accurate.

Animating a path

Here we have a Business Process Diagram describing the business process of handling an order issued by a customer.
1.	To launch an animation, select Tools > Animacian from the main menu, or press on the Animacian button on the toolbar.
	This opens the Business Process Animacian dialog box where you can select an execution path to play an animation.
	Let's go through different parts of this dialog box. The Paths list lists all possible executions of the process. You can select a path and animate it by pressing the Play button.
	The Components list displays the components that form the selected Path. Pressing on a component will highlight the first shape of the chosen path until the chosen shape, in the opening diagram.
	Filter helps removing the undesired paths by specifying the end result of fork nodes. More about filter will be described in the section below.
	The Option pane allows you to make the following changes: - List also the invalid, non play-able paths in the Paths list (More about valid and invalid paths will be covered below). - Dim the components that are not a part of the selected path. - Jump to the first node of a chosen path upon selection, or keep staying at the current viewing region. - Minimize this dialog box (Business Process Animacian) when playing an animation. - Avoid accidental editing when playing by locking the diagram.
	The buttons and slider are for controlling the flow of animation.
2.	Select a path from the Paths list for animating. A path is a possible way of walking through the process.
	By making a selection, the path will be highlighted on the diagram. Since the option "Dim other path" is selected, those non involved shapes will be dimmed.
3.	We can select a component in the Components list to make it highlight from the first shape in the path until the selected one.
4.	Animate the chosen path by pressing the Play button.
	This starts the animation. A token which looks like a tiny black dot will appear and traverse along the path. When it is arriving a shape, the arriving shape will be highlighted.
	The animation will end when it reaches the end of the path. You can travel along the execution by updating the slider position at the bottom of the diagram.

Filtering paths

When there are fork nodes within a process, we can configure filter to reduce path by limiting the outgoing flows of the fork nodes.
1.	To configure filter, click on the Filter... button in the Business Process Animacian dialog box.
	This displays the Filter Configuration dialog box.
2.	The filters here are actually the fork nodes in the diagram (the green shapes below).
	The possible selections for filtering are the possible outgoing flows. By specifying the allowed outgoing flows, those inappropriate paths will be discarded.
	By applying filter, paths are reduced, like this:

Invalid Paths

When you can't find the desired path being listed for animating, it could be that the path is considered as invalid. Here are two possible invalid paths pattern.
	Fork without Join
	Join without Fork

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