Process icons are not process instances; they are just envelopes that transport instances. When you drag an icon to an image, you execute a copy of the instance transported by the icon, but the icon itself is actually not used at all, beyond the GUI drag and drop operation.
When you rename an icon, you are just defining a property of the icon (its identifier), but the transported instance is not changed. Hence the icon identifier is not stored in the image's processing history.
Process instances have a much more powerful property to describe what an instance does and its role in a processing workflow: the instance description. You can edit an instance description in several ways:
(a) If the instance is being transported by an icon, do one of the following:
- Right-click the icon and select "Edit instance information"[1]
- Click the small "D" icon at the bottom right corner of the icon to read the description. Then you can click the "Edit" button (arrow) to modify it.
Note that when an icon transports an instance with a nonempty description, the small "D" icon is filled with a red color.
(b) If the instance belongs to a ProcessContainer instance, select it and click the "Edit Description" button on the ProcessContainer tool. Note that there is also a similar button on the History Explorer window, so you can modify instance descriptions directly when you are inspecting a view's processing history.
(c) Finally, if you are a programmer kind of person and/or are willing to hack things a bit, you can also edit an instance's source code to modify the P.setDescription( "..." ); function call. Currently this can only be done on the ProcessContainer interface.
In instance descriptions you can use console tags to modify the appearance and structure of the text. Typically, basic console tags such as <i></i> <b></b> <u></u> are used to define italics, bold and underlined text, respectively. More complex HTML 4 code can be used if the description is enclosed by <html></html> tags; for example, this is a valid instance description:
<html>
<p style="font-size: 14pt;">
This is a <i>test</i> <b>HistogramTransformation</b> process.
</p>
</html>
You can use bulleted lists, tables and CSS code to define rich and complex documents describing process instances.
[1] This menu item is incorrect. It will be "Edit instance description" in the next version.
