Writing Novulo Instructions manually
Instructions play an important role in guiding your users through the business processes in your application. At Novulo, you can look at two types of instructions:
- Generic component-based instructions; these are added in the Architect to components and describe the functionality of the fields and processes in that component. These instructions can stretch multiple components, and - after deploying your application - form coherent instruction scenario’s fitted to your composition. For more information on this functionality, click here for page instructions and here for process instructions
- Custom, handwritten instructions; these can be configured by you in your application. As these don’t have to be generic, you can describe your business process as specific as you need.
This article goes into the second topic.
Business processes
All instructions of your application are found in the table Business processes. This includes automatically generated instructions as well as manual instructions.
The module ‘My business processes’, found in ‘My apps’, shows all instructions that you are the intended audience for.
You can identify manual instructions with the column “Is manual”:
In ‘Settings’ > ‘Business processes’, you’ll find the grid where you can add new instructions.
The column Start opens the instruction. Try it out!
Business process configuration
When adding a new business process, if your aim is to create a manually written instruction, the notable settings are:
- Description: give a name to your instruction
- Audience: decide who should see this instruction in ‘My business processes’
- Display position: will this instruction be opened as a pop-up, or as a modal on the right-hand side of the application
- Active from/until: optionally decide when the instruction is available
The other settings are mostly only relevant for generated instructions.
After saving the business process, you can add activities. Each activity is displayed as a seperate page in your instruction, and the user will be guided through the activities based on their sequence number.
You can choose to create a new activity, or re-use an existing activity.
The activities have a description, to name this step/activity of your instruction, and an HTML content field, which allows you to insert images and use mark-up to make your instructions as clear as possible.
Have a look at the instruction “Novulo Basic instruction (3.8) NL” as an example!