Deployment Considerations
Some forethought and planning must be applied if you working with e-form environments in a multiple or clustered Integration Server installation.
In these situations, exercise caution when deploying environments from the Central Configuration interface. If you deploy an e-form environment to more than one Integration Server/Process Engine host, you create a situation where you can start multiple (duplicate) business processes when an e-form instance arrives in an instances folder. Take care to avoid this situation.
In addition, when configuring your business process models for e-form use, do not configure more than one monitoring connection for each instances folder. In other words, you must maintain a one-to-one relationship between an instances folder and a single receive step.
Consider the following conditions:
Where are my e-form enabled process models running? When you upload an e-form enabled process model to an
Integration Server/
Process Engine host, the
Process Engine monitors the e-form instance folder specified within the process for instances of a specifically named e-form document. If you upload the same process model to two or more
Integration Server/
Process Engine hosts that have the same e-form environment, a new business process instance will start on each host when a new instance of the named e-form document arrives in the monitored instances folder. Furthermore, you will have created multiple listener connections to each instances folder, which must be avoided.
What e-form documents and folders am I monitoring? When you define an e-form enabled process model, you specify an instances folder to monitor and a specific e-form document name to look for in the folder. Consider this example:
You create Process1 to monitor the Instances folder in your repository for arrival of E-formDocumentA, and upload Process1 to
Integration Server/
Process Engine host Alpha.
You create Process2 to monitor the same Instances folder in your repository for arrival of E-formDocumentB, and upload Process2 to
Integration Server/
Process Engine host Beta.
You deploy your e-form environment to both hosts Alpha and Beta. Both hosts monitor the same instances folder, but because the
Process Engine on each host is monitoring for a separate e-form document, new process instances will run separately on each host, as expected.
However, this implementation violates two requirements: 1) you will have created multiple listener connections to the Instances folder, which must be avoided, and 2) you have placed two separate e-form documents in the same instances folder, which must also be avoided.
In this situation, the correct approach would be:
Create two separate instances folders, one for E-formDocumentA and one for E-formDocumentB.
Configure two e-form environments, each one describing the path to only one of the instances folders.
Deploy the E-formDocumentA environment to host Alpha where Process1 will run, and the E-formDocumentB environment to host Beta, where Process2 will run.
This solution satisfies the requirements of "one listener connection per folder" and "one e-form document per folder," ensuring proper operation.
