Basic Activities Palette

Basic activities are a simple means of interacting with a service, manipulating the passing data, or handling exceptions. They also contain Loops that are Groups with Conditions, which follow a pattern at run time such as, initialize the loop, update the loop at each iteration, and test conditions for the loop to stop iterating.

The available types of loops are:

  • Local Transaction

  • For Each
  • Iterate
  • Repeat
  • Repeat On Error
  • Scope
  • While
  • Critical Section
    Critical Section groups are used to synchronize process instances. At run time, multiple process instances can be executed concurrently. You can use Critical Section groups to synchronize the set of actions performed in the process across multiple process instances. Only one process instance can execute the Critical Section group and its contents at any specified time. Other concurrently running process instances that are associated with the corresponding Critical Section group wait at the start of the Critical Section group, until the process instance that is currently executing complete the Critical Section group.
  • Local Transaction
    Use Local Transaction group for multiple activities to be part of a local transaction. A local transaction group ensures that all participants of the transaction are rolled back together. A single resource performs all its transaction work.
  • For Each
    The For Each group is a loop element that can be used for iterating through array elements. The For Each activity is very useful to determine these array elements dynamically at run time.
  • Iterate
    An Iterate group repeats the series of grouped activities once for every item in an existing sequence or list. The list can be items of any datatype. The loop executes for the number of iterations specified.
  • Repeat
    The Repeat group activity is responsible for repeating the series of grouped activities until the specified condition evaluates to true. The activities are always executed once before checking whether the condition is true. After executing the series of activities, the initial evaluation of the condition is done, and it does not repeat when the condition evaluates as true. The Repeat activity evaluates the loop's conditional statement to determine whether or not more iterations of the loop are required.
  • Repeat on Error
    Using the Repeat on Error group, you can repeat a series of activities when an unmanageable error occurs. The activities in this group are executed once. If there are no unmanageable errors, the loop terminates. If an error occurs for which there is no error transition, the condition of the loop is evaluated. If the condition is true, the loop terminates. If the condition is false, the loop repeats until there is no error or the condition is true.
  • Scope
    The Scope group comprises a collection of nested activities. Scope group is shared by all the nested activities. You can use a Scope to contain a unit of work, by making it easy to manage, execute, and revert. For example, if a customer cancels an online order, the money must be returned and the online order canceled, without affecting other orders. You can use a Scope to manage these activities as a unit.
  • While
    The While activity repeats the series of grouped activities if the specified condition evaluates as true. The condition is evaluated when the group is enters. If the condition evaluates to false, the activities within the group are not executed.
  • Constructor
    You must use the constructor for each class to instantiate that class.
  • Compensate
    Compensate activity is executed only from the compensation handlers when a fault is encountered outside a scope (this scope has compensation handler defined). This activity triggers compensation handler for a scope present only on the same level. All activities present in scope get executed successfully.
  • Empty
    An Empty activity denotes an activity with no action to be performed. You can specify the Name and Description, but there is no input or output for this activity.
  • Exit
    Exit activity is a synchronous activity that cancels any asynchronous activities that are in a waiting state and terminate the process instance. You can specify the Name and Description, but there is no input or output for this activity.
  • Get Context
    The Get Context activity retrieves the value of the specified context parameter. This is useful if your process requires some context information from a request or a response.
  • Invoke
    Invoke activity is an asynchronous activity that calls an operation of a process reference. The process reference can be configured to invoke another process (subprocess) or invoke an external service through a binding such as SOAP.
  • Rethrow
    Rethrow activity is used within an exception-handling routine to throw the caught error again. This is useful if you want to perform some processing within an error-handling routine, and also send it to the next higher scope.
  • Receive
    Receive activity initiates the process execution based on the receipt of a request message for an operation of the process service. The Receive activity can be configured to act as a process starter or a signal-in activity.
  • Reply
    Reply activity is a synchronous activity that sends a message in response to a request message that was received for an operation of a process service. This activity can be used to send a reply or a fault.
  • Set Context
    The Set Context activity can be used to set the value of a context information resource.
  • Set EPR
    Set EPR activity is a dynamic alternative to the static service element defined in the WSDL.This activity determines which service to be invoked in an application.To use an incoming message, define the EPR schema as a part of the message in the WSDL.
  • Throw
    The Throw activity throws the specified fault and the control is passed to any error-handling routine defined to handle the error. This activity is useful in a group or in a called process. You can use this activity to catch and raise your own error conditions. The Throw activity is useful if an error in the business logic occurs during processing.
  • Start
    The Start activity is the first activity, and acts as the starter activity, in a direct subprocess definition. A direct subprocess can be called from a parent process, and the Start activity is used to define the input expected by the process.
  • End
    The End activity is the last activity in a direct subprocess definition. When a direct subprocess is called from another process, the direct subprocess provides output data to the calling process. You can map data from other activities in the process to an output schema specified on the End activity. This becomes the output of the process.
  • Engine Command
    The Engine Command activity allows you to retrieve statistics and information about process definitions, process instances, and activities for the application and the appnode that is executing the command. This activity also lets you perform job maintenance, such as suspending and resuming the process instances.