Activity Elements (Designing Business Processes in the Sun Business Process Manager)

Designing Business Processes in the Sun Business Process Manager

Activity Elements

Activity elements include those activities that are common to most BPs, such as Start, End, Receive, Reply, and so on. Table 2 lists and describes the activity elements. These activities are all available from the Business Process Designer toolbar except the start and end nodes, which appear automatically on the Business Process Designer canvas when a BP is created.

Table 2 Activity Elements


Name	Description
Start	Indicates the start of the process. This element appears in the Business Process Designer by default when you create a new BP model; it does not have a corresponding icon on the Business Process Designer toolbar. A start node can only link to a receive activity, and cannot be deleted.
End	Indicates the completed state of a BP. This element appears in the Business Process Designer by default when you create a new BP model; it does not have a corresponding icon on the Business Process Designer toolbar. An end node cannot be deleted.
Receive Activity	Indicates the invocation of a BP, or indicates to wait for the arrival of an inbound message. The receive activity represents the actual method by which a BP is initiated.
Activity	Invokes a web service or a Java CAPS component. Depending upon the configuration of the component, a response might be required.
Reply Activity	Allows a BP to respond to the external system or user that originally invoked the BP. The receive activity at the beginning of the BP is paired with the reply activity at the end of the process. In cases where a message must be sent back to the caller of the BP, the reply activity uses information that correlates the message in the calling system. A reply activity is the last step in a BP in which the BP acts as a web service or sub-process. It correlates the outbound message back to the calling process; for example, it can reply to an external system as a web service.
Business Rule Activity	Maps and manipulates data using the Business Rule Designer (see The Business Rule Editor). You can also add a Business Rule to some links for the same purpose.
Compensate	Invokes compensation on an inner scope that has already completed normally. This construct can be invoked only from within a fault handler or another compensation handler.
Empty Activity	Allows data to pass through without any changes.
Wait Activity	Delays processing for a set period of time.
User Activity	Represents a step in a BP that requires human intervention. This activity must be configured by adding task assignments to the Worklist Manager. When a BP instance comes to a user activity, it creates a task and polls a table for the status of the task. In order for the user activity to complete, the user or the external application must update the status of the task.
User Activity API	Represents and configures a step in a BP that requires human intervention from an external application. This activity must also be configured by adding task assignments to the Worklist Manager.