Introduction to Connecting Process Automation and Decisions

The integration between Process Automation and the Decision Platform enables seamless communication between decisions and processes. You can use the Execute Decision business component within Process Automation to call out to a decision, or alternatively, you can use the Execute Process action in irAuthor to call out to Process Automation and execute a process from rules.

• Process Automation calling a Decision - use the Execute Decision component to pass data from a form in a process to the decision engine, and in turn receive any notifications and updates to the form.

• Decisions calling Process Automation – use the Execute Process action from irAuthor to initiate a process in Process Automation passing in the appropriate start message fields.

Both integration approaches rely on the Process Automation extension for irAuthor to manage connections to Process Automation.  Beyond that, there is additional configuration and setup in both irAuthor and Process Automation that is specific to either integration pattern. 

For example, to call InRule from a process model in Process Automation, you will need to perform the following steps:

1. Install the Process Automation extension for irAuthor  to connect to your Process Automation environment
2. Configure the Execute Decision component in Process Automation
3. Add the Execute Decision component to your process

After completing these steps, rules and decisions can be executed inside Process Automation processes.

Below is an overview of the end-to-end process for executing a decision with InRule.

Connecting to Process Automation

To help facilitate configuration between the InRule SaaS Portal and Process Automation environments, the InRule SaaS portal provides a link to Process Automation in the navigation menu. For trial users, this will automatically link to Process Automation with integrated authentication, but licensed customers will want to add users in Process Automation before they can link from the portal.

If it is your first time connecting, you may need to allow pop-ups from your browser.

Click on the pop-up blocked notification on the right side of the search bar.

Then in the window, select Always allow pop-ups and redirects.

If you would like to directly log in to Process Automation, you can do so by navigating to the Process Automation Login page and using the Login with Corporate account option to log in with your InRule account. It is important to note that this login option is not available without first connecting to Process Automation from your portal. 

Throughout the subsequent related articles, there are a number of distinctions between steps for Trial Users vs Licensed Customers. This is primarily due to differences between shared and dedicated environments, but the underlying implementation and functionality remains the same.