Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide > For Developers: Understanding How Workflow Processes Are Designed > Handling Events >

About the Workflow User Event Business Service

User events can be generated anywhere in the Siebel enterprise (wherever a Siebel business service is used) by calling the Workflow User Event business service. The Workflow User Event business service is used for one-way communication from the run-time client to the Workflow Process Manager server component. If a long-running workflow runs in the run-time user session, you can use a service workflow or an interactive workflow to trigger this long-running workflow. But to trigger a long-running flow to be run in WFProcMgr, you need to send a notification. The Workflow User Event business service sends this notification in the form of a user event.

Arguments

The following arguments define a Workflow User Event business service:

• User Event Name. The name of a user event is an agreement between the creator (an external entity) and the recipient (the workflow definition). It has no special significance, except that the incoming event name and the workflow instance definition must specify exactly the same user event name in order to successfully communicate with each other. User event names must be unique. It is best to logically name user events after the business purpose they serve (for example, "Event Transferring Send Order Confirmation from Vitira To Siebel - V2").
• Correlation. Used to match an incoming message with a workflow instance using business data such as an order number. Correlation is the process of matching an incoming message with a workflow instance using business data such as an order ID. In this release, correlation applies to user events reaching long-running workflows. It is often the case that Siebel Workflow communicates with an external entity and the external entity is unaware that it is in contact with a Siebel workflow. In such cases, it is difficult for the external entity to use a Siebel identifier (like the workflow process instance ID) to identify the recipient. It is more convenient to use a piece of business data (such as an order number) to identify the recipient. The correlator serves this purpose. A long-running workflow can specify a process property as a correlator.

  NOTE:  Only one process property can be used as a correlator.

• Payload. When the user event is created, the user can specify any data as payload. This data is delivered to the workflow instance that receives the event. When the workflow is defined to wait for a user event, the definition can specify a process property to receive this payload data. The payload is a single value—only one payload can be passed.

  NOTE:  If your situation calls for sending complex or structured data, you should convert the data into an XML document (using the XML converter) and then pass the resulting XML string as the payload of the event. The receiving workflow can then call the XML converter again to recover the original data structure.