About Reusable Processes

Reusable processes are processes that can be called from other business processes. They become child processes within the main parent process.

Reusable processes have the following characteristics:

• Must always begin with a none start event and end with a none end event.
• Can only be called by other business processes by using the Call activity.
• Since reusable processes are used as child processes within a main process, they can't contain elements that only make sense in an independent process, such as message start events, form start events or service activities.

To use a reusable process in a business process:

1. Create a reusable process.
   Keep in mind the characteristics of a reusable process while creating the process.
2. Call the reusable process in a business process.
   1. Open the main (parent) process where you want to use the reusable process as a child process.
   2. Expand the System category in the Activities palette, and drag and drop a Call activity onto the process flow.
   3. Double-click the call activity to open its properties pane.

      Select the call activity, then click and select Open Properties to open its properties pane.

   4. Under the Implementation section of the properties pane, select the reusable process from the Process drop-down field.
      The reusable process that you created in step 1 should appear in the Process drop-down field.
   5. Close the properties pane to save the changes.
3. Define data associations for the call activity to pass the input data to the reusable (child) process and receive the output data from it.
   See Configure Data Association.