Activity Overview

Activities are the individual units of work in a process definition. Activities are generally operations that interface to external systems, but activities can also perform internal processing. Activities are available on the various palettes in TIBCO Designer. Each palette has a set of activities that can be performed for that palette. For example, the following activities are included in the ActiveEnterprise Adapter palette:

Example activities

Activity Name

Function

Publish to Adapter

Sends a message to the specified adapter.

Adapter Subscriber

Receives a message from the specified adapter and starts a process.

Respond to Adapter Request

Replies to a message sent by an adapter.

The following are examples of palettes and some of the activities the palettes contain:

  • File

Create File
Remove File
Write File
Read File
  • FTP

FTP Put
FTP Get
  • JDBC

JDBC Query
JDBC Call Procedure
JDBC Update
  • Mail

Send Mail

When you are in a process definition in TIBCO Designer, the activity palettes are available to drag and drop activities into the process definition. Each activity usually has two or more of the following tabs for specifying the characteristics of the activity:

  • Configuration — Used for general configuration of the activity. For example, this tab specifies the adapter service to use for an Adapter activity.

  • Advanced — Any advanced configuration parameters are specified here.

  • Event — For activities that wait for incoming events, such as HTTP requests or incoming TIBCO Rendezvous messages, this tab specifies the timeout for the incoming event and a condition to determine whether the incoming event is the correct one for the specific process instance.

  • Editor — A data schema for the activity. This is used when the input or output data is not known by the activity, and the user must specify their own schema. Once specified, the schema becomes available on the Input, Output or both tabs of the activity.

  • Input — The output data from all activities that precede this activity in the process definition is available for mapping to this activity’s input schema.

  • Output — The activity’s data is output to activities that follow in the process definition.

The sections that follow describe each tab used to specify an activity. There is a section for each available activity palette. See the activity palette section for more information about the specific activity you wish to use.

There are two activities that are included in a process definition by default: the Start activity and the End activity. For more information about these activities, see Start Activity and End Activity .