How You Define the Business Process

You define the actions that take place in a business process by using Designer to design a process model. A process model is a diagram that shows the steps in the business process. You set properties for each step to further define information about the actions to take for each step. For example, you can set properties that identify a service to invoke for a step.

Designer is a design-time tool only. Before the process model can be executed, you must create run-time elements for a process model. This is called building and uploading the process model. When you build and upload the process model, Designer generates triggers, flow services, etc. based on the steps in your process model and saves these run-time elements in the Integration Server namespace.

At run time the Process Engine, which is a facility of the Integration Server, manages the execution of business processes. The Process Engine executes the business process by using the appropriate run-time elements that were generated from a process model.

Typically, a business process starts based on the arrival of a document. It is the responsibility of the Process Engine to determine the actions to take for a specific document. The Process Engine determines the process model to use for the document and defines a new instance of the process model to govern the actions to take for the business process. When a subsequent document for the business process arrives, it is the Process Engine that determines the correct running instance of a process model and rejoins the business process by passing the document that just arrived.

The way the Process Engine determines the documents that belong to a single instance of a business process is through the conversation ID. All documents in the same instance of a business process share an identifier called a conversation ID. When the Process Engine receives a document, it determines whether it has a running business process that uses the conversation ID. If it does, the Process Engine passes the document to the running business process to rejoin the running business process. If there is no running business process that uses that conversation ID, the Process Engine searches for a process model where the first step is “waits for document”, and if found, starts a new instance of the process model.

As the Process Engine manages the execution of a business process, it logs its progress and status to the Process Audit Log database component. You can view the progress and status using webMethods Monitor.