Dynamic generation of process documentation

As the person responsible for IT and processes, you must ensure that the interfaces between applications are always documented in detail. Experience shows that keeping this documentation up to date at all times is a particular challenge because applications and thus interfaces are frequently expanded or adapted.

Goals and benefits

With the help of ADIB, you can master this challenge with manageable effort. To do this, you enter some information about applications and interfaces in CentralStation. This is quite easy to do thanks to an integrated text editor.

Thanks to ADIB, you save yourself the trouble of creating detailed process documentation – ADIB does this for you at the touch of a button. This saves you a lot of time and effort re-entering this data in another tool – which, as experience shows, is rarely up to date. This will not happen to you with ADIB!

This allows you to establish ADIB as the central solution for process configuration and documentation

Creation of current process documentation at the touch of a button
Export of documentation as PDF or Word file
Process documentation always corresponds exactly to the current status

Creating and generating documentation

Using the integrated text editor, you can store some basic information and diagrams directly while creating the interface

At job level – i.e. for the entire integration task
At step level – and thus for the individual data transfer between a source and a target.

In the example, an explanation including a diagram was also stored at job level. To start the editor, double-click on the ‘Description’ field in the corresponding job.

cest_documentation-0 \Image 1: Double-click on the ‘Description’ field to start the editor

cest_documentation-1 \Image 2: Integrated editor for maintaining basic information

Proceed in the same way at the step level. However, it is sufficient to enter only basic information here. Detailed information such as the transferred fields, the stored parameters, the time and day on which the job runs, etc. is automatically added by ADIB based on the configuration you have made.

To create the process document, click on the ‘Process Documentation’ button in the upper area of the job mask.
This opens the following mask, in which you can make various settings.
- (1) : Selection of the instance for which the documentation is to be created
- (2) : Level of detail of the documentation : Here you define whether the step parameters and step positions (all or only the active ones) are to be output
- (3) : Output of additional configuration elements
  - Mapping lists
  - Flexmapping lists
  - Additional settings
- It makes sense to output the process documentation separately for each instance. If you have very extensive mapping lists, it may make sense not to output them.

cest_documentation-2 \Image 3: Settings options for generating the process documentation

After clicking OK in the lower right area, a preview is created.

cest_documentation-3 \Image 4: Preview of the process documentation based on the settings you have made

You can then export the document as a PDF (or in docx format for further editing).
- The created PDF has an automatically generated table of contents, which makes navigation within the document very easy.

cest_documentation-4 \Image 5: Process start page and automatically generated navigation area * According to the settings, the step parameters, step positions, etc. are added to each step with the current configuration, so that the created process documentation is always up to date!

cest_documentation-5 \Image 6: Current parameters/positions are automatically included in the documentation