Business Process and Element Properties Overview

You can define properties at two levels for a Business Process. The Business Process properties define the configuration of the entire Business Process. Modeling element properties define the configuration for specific elements in the Business Process. Certain properties for both the Business Process and the modeling elements are automatically defined as you create a Business Process.

Business Process Properties

Each Business Process has a set of properties that you allow you to configure the components and attributes of the Business Process model. These properties provide rapid creation and deletion of Business Process attributes. BPM uses this information to automatically create the appropriate Business Process attributes and the input and output structures for use in the Business Rule Designer. From the Business Process Properties window, you can edit the following types of properties:

• General Properties — Define general information about the Business Process, such as its name, the URL, persistence, and so on.

• Business Process Attributes — Allow you to share data between activities in a Business Process as well as move data to and from the components that implement those activities. Also known as containers.

• Partners — Identify external systems to which Project components are mapped in the Connectivity Map.

• Correlations— Allow you to match existing Business Process instances to messages that are arriving into a Business Process based on specific data values. How messages are processed is based on those data values.

• WSDL Files — Allow you to invoke and operate web services on the Internet and to access and invoke remote applications and databases. Web Service Definitions are embodied as Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) files, and are used when you are building a web service.

• Grid Properties— Grid properties allow you to display or hide the grid, to specify whether modeling elements are snapped to the grid, and to configure the grid appearance.

Modeling Element Properties

Most modeling elements in a Business Process have a set of properties that you can modify from the element’s property sheet. You can specify a partner for an activity, define transactional support, bind correlation sets to an activity, define exceptions, create alerts and log messages, specify port types and partners, and more. The property sheets are accessed through the Show Property Sheet tool on the Business Process Designer toolbar, and the properties appear in the Business Process Designer to the right of the Business Process.