Refactoring Service Processes and Service Process Interfaces

You can convert an existing business, pageflow or sub-process into a service process or, alternatively, a service process into a business, pageflow or sub-process. You can also refactor a service process interface into a process interface, and vice versa.

There are some activities that are not supported in a service process or service process interface. If the business process or pageflow process you want to convert to a service process contains any of the unsupported activities, validation errors occur. To avoid validation errors, you must remove any of the unsupported activities before conversion.
The following activity types cannot be used:
Activity Type Description
User Tasks No direct user interaction with a service process is supported.
Manual ad-hoc activities No direct user interaction with a service process is supported.
Inbound message events and receive tasks that require correlation Outbound message events are supported.
Event sub-processes responding to externally sourced signals/messages and inter process signals This could result in unacceptably long pauses and, as service processes can be invoked from both pageflows and business services, this feature is disabled for service processes. Event sub-processes for internal process signals are supported.
Attached sub-process calls to non-service process types Service processes can only synchronously invoke other service processes. However, they can asynchronously invoke conventional stateful business processes.
Non-boundary timers Timers that pause rather than monitor the execution of a thread of the service process are not supported.

Right-click the business, pageflow or sub-process you want to convert and select Convert to service process. In the same way, you can convert a service process to a business process or pageflow process.

You can also refactor a service process interface into a process interface by right-clicking a service process interface and selecting Convert to Process Interface. Similarly, you can convert a process interface into a service process interface by selecting a process interface and selecting Convert to Service Process Interface . When you convert a process interface into a service process interface, the deployment target is automatically set to Deploy to Process Run-time so, if you want your converted service process interface to implement service processes deployed to the pageflow engine, you must go back and configure this in the service process interface after conversion.