About Business Data Fields in the Run-time Environment
When a task application is published to the My webMethods Server runtime, individual task instances can be started either automatically from a process or manually by a user. The specified business data for a task instance is populated from various sources as the task moves through its life cycle.
These business data fields and their values are stored in one of two database tables created and maintained by the Task Engine:
The
Task Engine stores all task business data for all tasks as a binary large object (BLOB) within a full-search database table. While this makes all business data available for all tasks, the BLOB must be de-serialized to make the information available, and it can be quite large when many tasks are present.
When a task contains indexed business data fields, those fields are stored in a separate indexed fields database table as well as the BLOB; the indexed fields table contains only indexed business data fields and their values. The indexed field table is created dynamically when a task application containing indexed business data fields is published to
My webMethods Server. The indexed field table provides a limited but much faster search mechanism that is especially useful in situations when a very large number of tasks are present in a task inbox.
The Task Engine maintains both database tables and updates them dynamically as new tasks are queued in the system or as existing tasks are deleted from the system.
As noted above, the indexed field table is populated any time a published task contains indexed business data fields. Special considerations apply when you publish a task type that contains indexed business fields to the run-time environment; for more information, see
Considerations When Publishing Tasks with
Indexed Data.
To enable the run-time user to access this data, you can implement either or both of the following methods:
Configure the task to access the data with an indexed search provider.
Access the indexed business data table with a built-in search service in the WmTaskClient package on
Integration Server. For more information, see the indexed search services described in
Working with the Task Engine APIs.
Note that if you configure a task with only an indexed search provider and you do not include any indexed data fields, run-time business data searches executed by the user will return no results even though the business data exists in the task.
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