If you want to know, how processes are linked, where components are used or where a certain activity is linked in one or more processes, the Gluu Explorer can help you get that overview. You find the Explorer in the left-hand menu under 'Processes'.

Furthermore, every process and activity has its own Explorer in the left-hand menu and so does forms, but more about that later.

Here's what's covered in this article:

If you want to see examples of how to use the Explorer in real-life scenarios, take a look at this webinar.

Now, let's start by looking at the Explorer from an account perspective.

At the very top level of the Explorer, you have the full overview of all connections in your Gluu account and the Explorer lets you click and zoom to explore certain parts in more detail, should you wish to do so.

This information you can only get in the Explorer, as it looks at everything in your account all at once, not only a specific part, like when you are searching or using filters on the process or activity pages for instance. You could say, the Explorer is the helicopter view of your account.

However, we are often not interested in looking at everything all at once. Usually, we are looking for a specific kind of connection e.g.:

These things mentioned above, you can get an overview of by using the Explorer settings, highlight search bar and/or the filters. This allows you to get a simple overview of complex connections across your account.

Lets say you want to see how a certain component is linked to other elements in Gluu. In that case, you apply the component as a filter and the Explorer will then only show you connections with that specific component as the center. The immediate connections are show as directly linked to the component, so those would be activities, as they are where components can be used.

However, the Explorer is really clever, so as you move from the center (the component in this case) and outwards, more and more connections are shown to illustrate how everything is linked to each other.

You also have the option of using a label as a filter, so that you only see an Explorer overview based on where that filter is used. That lets you see useful things like what process owners are overseeing your ISO processes like in the example shown below.

However, if you already know that you want a certain process or activity to be your starting point or if you want information about a process you are working on, we recommend using the specific process Explorer instead of the account Explorer.

If you enter the Explorer from a process page that process is automatically pre-selected as the starting point of the Explorer. Say you are about to edit the work instruction in an activity, but you are unsure whether the activity is linked in other processes, so you need to be mindful of how any changes will affect those processes as well. Don't worry, the Explorer will give you that information in a heartbeat!

TIP! Connected processes are a darker green, if they do not originate from the process you are currently looking at and the process the activity does originate from is also shown (see illustration above).

If you are using forms as part of Gluu task management when executing your processes, the Explorer also gives you a very nice overview here.

It shows you what tasks the forms are connected to and what activities in which processes they belong to.

It is also a very useful way to get an overview of forms that are not being used or forms that are connected to a task but has never been submitted = the task has never been completed.

You can even filter the view based on specific fields used in one or more forms or by forms editor.

There is a bunch of different filtering options in the different Explorer views and they are pretty self-explanatory for the most part and look a lot like filters elsewhere in Gluu.

Read more about filtering here: How to filter processes and Advanced filtering of activities, tasks, cases, components and forms

However, you have some options in the Explorer settings:

The nodes are the circled shape and the relation is the lines between the nodes.

Node types: show or hide the nodes. The T on the right of the color control show or hide the text title over the node.

Collapse nodes: if many nodes are connected to a single node you can group or collapse them to a single node to clear up the view.

Node charge: Imagine every node is a magnet, increasing the charge makes them stay away from each other until relation length is reached.

Relation length: the maximum length between nodes.

Sticky mode: Checking this one will freeze everything as it is and allow you to manually reposition nodes, if you want to take a better looking screenshot for instance.

But really, the sky is the limit when it comes to what the Explorer can show you in terms of connections, and there is a multitude of options when it comes to combining filters and settings to get the exact overview you are looking for and all you have to do is to get started!