Part II: Building processes

This part teaches you to build a process in Spider: the concepts, a first process from scratch, and then the designer in depth.

It covers activities and connections, inputs and outputs, variables, types and expressions, gateways, sub-processes and loops, forms, templates, milestones and reports, triggers, and finally running and monitoring your processes, diagnostics, agents, and moving a process between organizations.

1. Concepts: process definitions, drafts and versions, runs, triggers, agents, environments, integration modules and connections, and a glossary.
2. Tutorial: your first process: build, publish and run Hello world.
3. The designer and its palette: the nodes, how they link, and the designer's check.
4. Activities and connections: where activities come from, their settings and versions, how a run hands them to an agent, demands, and connections.
5. Inputs: filling an input in with an expression, a variable, a literal, a template, a mapping or a picker.
6. Outputs: where results go, and Replace or Append.
7. Variables and parameters: names, default values, parameters, and which node sees which variable.
8. Types: the built-in types, your own, and which value fits where.
9. Expressions: the building blocks, the functions, and the expression builder.
10. Gateways and conditions: choosing a branch, running branches side by side, and joining them again.
11. Sub-processes and loops: a process inside a process, and repeating a node for each item of a list.
12. Starting other processes: starting a run of its own, at once or later.
13. Forms and user tasks: designing a form, asking people to fill it in during a run, and start forms.
14. Templates and e-mail: texts with the run's values in them, and sending e-mail.
15. Milestones and reports: showing how far a run got, and what it did.
16. Triggers: starting runs at set times, from other systems, from forms and from integration modules.
17. Running and monitoring: following runs, their statuses and logs, and what to do when one fails.
18. Diagnostics and screenshots: seeing what an activity saw.
19. Agents, agent-pools and demands: which agent runs an activity, and why a run waits for one.
20. Export and import: moving a process to another organization or server.