Designer 10.7 | webMethods BPM Process Development Help | Process Engine Processing | About Document Correlation
 
About Document Correlation
 
About Correlation Services
About Correlation Fields
Correlation Behavior with Non-Starting Events and Activities
Correlation is used to enable external documents to join running process instances. Each step that receives input (a subscription document) can use a correlation. Each of these steps has a Correlation page in the Properties view. A message start event, a signal start event, or a receive task designated Allow this receive task to start new process instance can start a new process instance.
Catching message intermediate events, Catching signal intermediate events, and receive tasks NOT designated Allow this receive task to start new process instance also use correlations.
In a typical run-time environment, instances of many different process models can be running simultaneously. When a published document arrives in the run-time environment, the Process Engine must determine which of the running processes the document is intended for. You must provide a means of correlating a particular document instance with a particular process instance. This can be done in two ways:
*By creating a correlation service the flow service editor in Designer and associating it with a receive step.
*By specifying a field in an incoming document to serve as a correlation field when configuring a receive step.
When you create a receive task in a process model, you can specify that it uses either a correlation field or a correlation service for document correlation, or no correlation. Correlation IDs are stored and tracked by the Process Engine; for more information, see Tracking Correlation IDs.
Correlation services are written in the flow service editor in Designer, and establish or match the correlation ID used by a process instance. For more information about using correlation services, see About Correlation Services.
*For more information about data mapping in Designer, see Mapping Data in Flow Services in webMethods Service Development Help.
*For specific information about the correlation services, see pub.prt.correlate:deleteCorrelation and pub.prt.correlate:establishCorrelation.
Tip:
When an Integration Server connection is required but not available, Designer prompts you to connect. If no Integration Server is configured, Designer prompts you to configure one so you can connect to it.
Note:
For intermediate receive steps, correlation retry behavior is defined in the subscription trigger. See the PDF publication Publish-Subscribe Developer’s Guide.
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