Case Data Overview

Case data is business data that is centrally managed by TIBCO® BPM Enterprise (formerly TIBCO 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.