Business Services

A business service is a set of actions that accomplishes some sort of business function. For example, a business service could be designed to handle an incoming insurance claim.

This business service may consist of the following actions:

  1. When the business service is started, a form is displayed that allows you to enter the claimant’s policy number.
  2. When the form with the policy number is submitted, a database is accessed to retrieve the claimant’s policy information.
  3. Another form is displayed that contains the policy information.
  4. After reviewing the policy information, and deciding it is a valid claim, submitting the form may start an instance of a process that is used to process the claim.
  5. The process instance that is started causes a work item to be sent to the appropriate user, who must open it and work on it.

Note that business services are stateless, meaning that if it consists of a number of forms, and you enter data into some forms, then cancel the business service (by clicking on the Cancel button on a form) before completing the business service, none of the data you entered on the previous forms is saved.

If a business performs a stateful action, that is, something that cannot be reversed (for example, writing to a database, starting a process instance, and so on.), typically it will be the last action performed by the business service.

The example business service described above is just one simple example. Depending on how it is designed, a business service may consist of the following types of actions:

  • Display forms - Multiple forms may be displayed in sequence. When a business service includes multiple forms, the user that starts the business service will be the one to work through all of the forms — as soon as the user submits one form, the next one in the sequence is displayed. Note, however, that if there is an action of some sort in-between forms (database access, script execution, etc.), there may be a delay in displaying the next form. If this occurs, a shaded mask is shown over the previous form, and a "Waiting for response" message is displayed.
  • Start process instances - One or more instances of processes may be started by a business service. resulting in one or more work items being sent to the appropriate users to process them.

    If the business service starts process instances, and results in work items, you can see those in the process instance and work item lists, respectively.

    This stateful type of action would typically be done as the last action in the business service.

  • Access databases - The business service may access a database to read or write information.
  • Scripts - Scripts can perform various functions, such as calculations, validation, etc.
  • Web services - External web service may also be called to perform some custom function.
  • Logical branching - The flow of the business service may branch in various ways, depending on its design.