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Process Properties Versus Property Sets

Siebel business services use a structure known as the property set to represent input and output data for a method call. Property sets are hierarchical structures containing name/value pairs, known as properties, at each level in the hierarchy. For a detailed description of property sets, see Integration Platform Technologies: Siebel eBusiness Application Integration Volume II.

Siebel Business Process Designer provides capabilities to store property sets as process properties. You can use process properties to pass property sets to and from business service steps. Such process properties have a data type of hierarchy, and can be used as input and output arguments for any business service method arguments that have a data type of hierarchy.

When you want to call a workflow as a business service, you can map the data contained in the input and output property sets to and from process properties. This is useful when you want to run a workflow within a script.

When a workflow process is started, any process properties of type string, number, or date will be initialized to the input property with the same name, if one exists. Any hierarchy process properties will be initialized with any child input property sets that have a matching name (type). Any process properties with their Default String set to "<Value>" will be initialized with the value in the Value field of the input property set.

When a workflow process completes, all process properties of type string, number, or date will be stored as properties in the output property set. Any hierarchy process properties will be stored as child property sets. If a process property with the name <Value> is defined, its value will be stored in the Value field of the output property set.

For more information, see Passing Parameters to and from Workflow with the Workflow Process Manager Business Service.