Start Your Camunda Process from an External Form

Let’s assume that your company needs to provide the ability to take information from customers and prospects which will then be used as input for a backend process for suggestions, complaints, and customer service issues.

Many processes start with a form populated with information by external users. The individual filling out the form may never directly interact with the process again or their interaction might just be the receipt of notifications or updates via email or text, but they do not need to be part of your Camunda process organization with a user account.

What can you do in this situation? Well, Camunda has simplified this situation with the ability to start your process from an external form. Let’s take a deeper look.

Why has this been a problem in the past?

Although it is quite easy to model a process with Camunda, historically it has been more complicated to make these processes more accessible to a wide variety of users. Companies were required to include participants in their Camunda organization to access Tasklist tasks, write code, or create webhooks to provide this functionality. Let’s face it, this was not the optimal solution because it took additional time and development to get these users involved in the process.

Moreover, it could be expensive to include them into your Camunda installation and it wasn’t a scalable solution. It hindered external users and internal changing staff and could impede user adoption. Not to mention that it added complexity to testing a process at scale with the target audience.

So, what has Camunda done to address this issue? We have provided the ability to launch your process from an external URL.

Using the public form to start a process

It’s really quite simple. Developers and business users can create forms using Modeler and then make these public via a URL. For example, a form is created to provide customer feedback similar to the one shown below in Modeler.

You simply connect this form to the start event of your process.

Now, before you can make the magic happen, you need to deploy your process model and enable Publication Access. Once the model is deployed, select your start event, scroll down the properties until you see “Publication” and toggle the “Public access disabled” to enabled.

The next step provides the magic—the publication of the form to a public URL. Click on the “Publication” tab.

This tab provides the public URL for your form.

That’s it. You can now access this URL to use your public form to initiate your Camunda process.

You did it—you have enabled public access to your process with ease and without any development required. You were able to use the form builder in Modeler to build an easy to use form and did not need to write code to give public access to Tasklist or create a webhook. It’s very simple and powerful.

What’s the value?

The ability to include external users to your processes and to minimize the need for additional users within your Camunda organization saves time, effort, and the cost associated with developing an external facing form. You can quickly reach a wider audience increasing user adoption. This can lead to your company capitalizing on the advanced functionality provided by Camunda.

For example, assume you are a financial services customer that needs to create an initial form for prospective customers to open new accounts. if you aren’t spending your time building and then connecting this external-facing form, you can spend your efforts on using Connectors to integrate with legacy systems, or advanced gateways to streamline your processes.