Siebel Business Process Framework: Workflow Guide > About Workflow Process Steps and Connectors > About Workflow Process Step Types >

About the Wait Step

The Wait step allows you to suspend process execution for a specific period of time or until a specific event occurs. Workflow administrators can specify to pause a process instance in units of seconds, minutes, hours, or days. In addition, administrators can specify a service calendar to account for business hours and days when waiting a specified duration.

If a workflow process includes a Wait step, by default it is persisted.

Note that the Wait step is often used for testing and development purposes. Unlike the Siebel Operation step, the Wait step can be used without impacting business component metadata or user data. To view an example that uses the wait step for testing, see Using a Run-Time Event Within a M:1 Relationship.

Defining a Wait Step

You can define a Wait step to pause a process instance.

To define a Wait step

Perform the procedure described in Adding a Step to a Workflow Process with the following modifications:

1. Make sure the Workflow Mode property for the workflow process is set to Interactive Flow.

   A wait step can only be used in an Interactive Flow. For more information, see About the Workflow Mode Property.

2. With the Wait step chosen in the canvas, define input and output arguments for the step in the MVPW.

   For more information, see About Process Properties.

   When defining a duration argument that is greater than 60 seconds, specify minutes or a larger unit of measure so that business component data is refreshed. Workflow is resumed from Workflow Process Manager when units of minutes or higher are specified. Wait steps with durations measured in anything other than seconds are automatically persisted.

About SleepMode and the 7.0 Flow Workflow Process

When a workflow process has the property Workflow Mode set to 7.0 Flow, the input argument SleepMode allows you to specify how the Wait step resumes the process:

• When set to the default Local value, the process is resumed within the session that launched the process.
• When set to Remote, the process is resumed on the server, by the Workflow Process Manager server component. A component request for the WfProcMgr server component is created to be run at the time determined by the Wait step's input argument called Duration.

Note that when a workflow process has the property Workflow Mode set to anything other than 7.0 Flow, the input argument SleepMode is ignored and the mode is always Remote. For more information, see About the Workflow Mode Property.