chesterdocs

#Getting started

Chester lets you describe a business process as a diagram, connect it to your systems, and run it.

#What you do in Chester

Every process goes through the same four steps, and each has its own section in this documentation:

flowchart LR
  M["Model<br/>(Designer)"] --> D["Deploy<br/>(Designer)"]
  D --> R["Run<br/>(Execution)"]
  R --> W["Monitor<br/>(Designer)"]
  W -. "fix and retry" .-> R
  W -. "change the model" .-> M
  1. Model — draw the process as a BPMN diagram and say what each step does: which system it calls, which form a person fills in, which condition decides a branch. See Modelling processes.
  2. Deploy — freeze the current model as a version that can run. See Deploying a process.
  3. Run — start the process, work on the tasks it hands out, chat with agents. See Running processes.
  4. Monitor — follow each run, see what failed and retry it. See Monitoring.

#Start here

  • Key concepts — the words Chester uses, and how the things they name fit together.
  • Your first process — build, deploy and run a small process end to end.
  • Find your way around — the sidebar, the tabs and the dashboard of the Designer, and the Execution app.

#The apps you work in

Chester has two apps you work in:

App Who uses it What you do there
Designer People who design and maintain processes Organise projects, model processes, build forms, connect systems, configure agents, deploy, monitor runs, manage users
Execution Everyone who takes part in a process Start processes from catalogs, work on your tasks, follow your own runs, chat with agents

Ready-made adapter templates come from the Registry, a central catalogue the Chester team maintains. You never open it yourself: you pick its templates in the Designer when you add an adapter — see Import an adapter from the Registry.

#Where things live

Processes are kept in a fixed hierarchy — see Organise your work:

flowchart TD
  P[Project] --> A[Process area]
  A --> G[Process group]
  G --> Pr[Process]
  S[System] -. "used by" .-> Pr

Systems — the external applications your processes talk to — are kept separately, so one system can serve every process that needs it. See Systems and adapters.