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.
A business service may consist of the following actions:
- When the business service is started, a form is displayed that allows you to enter the claimant’s policy number.
- When the form with the policy number is submitted, a database is accessed to retrieve the claimant’s policy information.
- Another form is displayed that contains the policy information.
- 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.
- 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 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 (e.g., writing to a database, starting a process instance, etc.), typically it will be the last action performed by the business service.
The objectAPI contains a BusinessServiceService to perform business service-related functions.