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

Automatic Recovery of Workflow Process Instances


If the Workflow Process Manager server component fails because of an exogenous event (such as a server crash), Siebel Workflow automatically resumes the interrupted workflow instances when the server restarts.

For a workflow process instance that cannot be automatically recoverable, you can manually recover the process. For example, if the server crashes in the middle of a Siebel operation to update a record, then the workflow can't know whether the Siebel Operation has completed. You may have to manually verify that the update was completed before resuming the workflow execution. In another case, if the Siebel operation is to query a set of records, then even after the server crashes, the workflow can be resumed automatically by requerying.

NOTE:  Automatic recovery of workflow processes applies to workflow processes that run in the server component. Workflow processes running on a local database are not recovered.

Recovery is performed by the Recovery Manager based on the process instance's state information that is saved by the Workflow engine. The state information is saved at recovery checkpoints. For performance optimization, the recovery checkpoints are determined by the Workflow engine based on the nature of the step and Allow Retry flag step parameter.

The application developer can minimize run-time overhead by using the Allow Retry flag to reduce the number of checkpoints. This parameter is set at the step level.

NOTE:  Set the Auto Retry flag for Siebel Operation steps and business service steps. Based on this information, the Workflow engine determines the recovery checkpoints.

If the Recovery Manager cannot determine from which step the workflow instance should recover, then those instances are marked for manual recovery.

Siebel Business Process Designer Administration Guide