Case Data Overview

Case data is business data that is centrally managed by ActiveMatrix BPM and can therefore be accessed and updated by multiple BPM process applications.

Business data is structured data that contains information about real-world entities or business concepts that an organization needs to manipulate, for example: Customer, Order, Orderline, Claim or Policy.

ActiveMatrix BPM supports two sorts of business data - normal (or local) business data, and (from version 3.0) case data. In contrast to normal business data, case data:

  • can have a state (that is, it can have data and/or documents associated with it).
  • can be referenced by a set of processes and/or work items that are responsible for making state changes to it.
  • has its own audit history, independent of any processes or work items that operate on it.

Case data can be modeled at design-time as case classes in a case data model, then represented at runtime as case objects, which can be referenced by corresponding case references.

Case objects and case references are both stored in a set of case data tables (that represent the case data model) in the case data store.

Any BPM application can interact with a case data model to create and use case data. A BPM application, in this context, is either:

  • a BPM process, defined in TIBCO Business Studio and deployed to the BPM runtime.
  • a custom client application that uses the ActiveMatrix BPM public API to invoke BPM services provided by the BPM runtime.

Case Data Features in ActiveMatrix BPM

ActiveMatrix BPM provides a broad range of features and capabilities that you can use to manage and manipulate case data in the following ways:

  • create the database tables to contain the case data store.
  • create, deploy, upgrade and delete case data models.
  • create, update and delete case objects in a process.
  • display and update case objects in forms or pageflows.
  • use case data to find in-progress work items and/or process instances that are associated with a particular case.
  • locate a particular case and perform case state-specific actions on it.
  • update case objects on an ad-hoc basis, independent of any enterprise process update - for example, a customer reporting a change of address.
  • generate standalone pageflows and forms which you can use to create, update or delete case objects in a particular case model.