For some documents, you might require multi-step processing that involves interaction among systems, people, and trading partners. An example of such a processing is the fulfillment of a purchase order that includes a purchase order document, human interaction to determine whether to approve the purchase order, and either an order acknowledgement (ACK) document or an order negative acknowledgement (NACK) document. For such processing, you can define a business process. You can use a business process instead of or in addition to a processing rule.

You define business processes in Software AG Designer. Designer generates the run-time elements needed to run the business processes (for example, triggers and flow services) in Integration Server. The Process Engine, which runs on Integration Server, manages the execution of business processes.

To handle documents sent by Trading Networks, you must define the business process to handle a conversation of related documents that all contain the same conversation ID. The conversation ID is the Trading Networks ConversationID system attribute. When you want to process documents using a business process, the document types for the document must tell Trading Networks to extract this attribute. When this attribute has been extracted, Trading Networks knows to pass the document to the Process Engine after Trading Networks processing is complete.

For complete information on business processes, see the webMethods BPM documentation.