Call Activity Concepts

When you create a business process, you might have one or more existing process models that you would like to include as part of your new process. If you can invoke these existing processes from within your new process, you can forgo the effort of recreating the existing functionality in your new process. Designer enables you to invoke an existing process model from within another model by implementing a BPMN 2.0 call activity step.

How you invoke the external process depends on the external process type, which can be either a BPMN callable process or a webMethods referenced process.

When you create a BPMN callable process, you configure it to start with a none start event, and you define an input and output signature for it, known as a global process specification. In this case, the call activity step passes the entire pipeline to the none start event in the callable process, and the callable process automatically returns its resulting pipeline to the parent. For more information, see About BPMN Callable Processes.

A webMethods referenced process is any other process model (that is, any process that is not a callable process) that you want to invoke from within your process model. A referenced process model typically starts with a message start event. You must configure start and return documents to facilitate the exchange of pipeline data between the two processes. For more information, see About webMethods Referenced Processes.

Important:
Although still available, the ability to invoke a referenced process from a call activity step is deprecated. You are advised to implement all of your steps that invoke another process with a call activity step that invokes a callable process.

The process containing the call activity step is sometimes referred to as the parent process, and the callable (or referenced) process is sometimes referred to as the child process. You can configure any call activity step for standard looping, as described in About Standard Looping, regardless of whether it is invoking a callable process or a referenced process.

In addition, you can configure a call activity step to invoke a specific process model statically, or to invoke one or more process models dynamically based on run-time information in the process pipeline. For more information, see About Statically-Invoked Processes and About Dynamically-Invoked Processes.

For more information about call activity steps and callable processes, see About Call Activities.