Overview of Error Handling

Errors can occur during activity processing. For example, an error may occur during a Send Mail activity if the specified mail host does not exist. You can specify that one transition out of an activity is to be taken in the case of an error. You then specify activities you wish to execute in the event of an error. This allows you to create error-handling procedures for dealing with potential runtime errors in your process definitions.

For example, the following illustrates a simple process that begins with an HTTP request and updates a database based on the incoming request. If the update is successful, the process ends. If an error is encountered (for example, the database is down), an email is sent to a system administrator, and then the process ends. The following figure illustrates this simple error-handling procedure. The error transition is used to specify the activities to execute in case of an error.

A simple error-handling procedure

Error handling can also involve significantly more complex processing. The following sections describe error handling in more detail.