Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved


Process Modeling Concepts : Activities

Activities
An activity represents work that a company or organization performs using business processes. An activity can be atomic (it is not broken down into a finer level of detail) or non-atomic. Atomic activities are represented in the Process Editor by tasks. For more information about how BPMN defines activities and tasks, see http://www.bpmn.org.
When creating the TIBCO Business Studio Process, each time a different person, group, role, or system does something, an activity is added to the Process.
Activities may be triggered by events such as the receipt of an email, phone call or workflow item, and may involve making a judgement on the presented facts and performing an action (such as entering data to a computer system, phoning someone in the same or a different organization, and so on).
A task in a process diagram represents an atomic activity (one that cannot be further broken down). A task of an unspecified type looks like this in the Process Editor:
If the activities can be broken down into finer steps, they should be represented as Sub-Processes. The Activity Type is set in the Properties view.
User Tasks
User tasks are those that require human interaction with a software application.
User tasks can be further configured for inbound and outbound parameters. Forms can be generated from the task’s input and output parameters, representing the information you want to present to and capture from the user.
You can also generate a pageflow process from a task.
TIBCO Business Studio Forms enables you to design, view, and test the forms you need to collect user input in a business process. You can create sophisticated forms without programming, and associate them with user tasks in order to provide richer user experiences for business process participants.
Manual Tasks
Manual tasks are those that are completed by a person without using software.
Service Tasks
Service tasks can ideally complete without human interaction (for example, an automatic email notification or a web service).
Script Tasks
Script tasks contain a set of instructions written in a scripting language (usually added to the step by the solution engineer) that will be executed in the runtime environment when the process is deployed and executed.
Using the business analysis capability, you can add text to a script task to describe the desired behavior of the script. However, by switching to solution design capability or by clicking Provide Implementation Details in the Properties view for the task, you can enter JavaScript to a script task. For more information, see the relevant implementation guide.
Send Tasks
Send tasks are used to send messages to a system or person outside of the process (often using a web service):
They can be paired with a receive task or message event to form a request response operation.
Receive Tasks
Receive tasks are used to wait for a message from a system or person outside of the process (often using a web service). This type of task can be used to start a process as long as it has no incoming sequence flow and there are no start events in the process:
On the Interface tab, you can add parameters to a receive task; however, you cannot add data fields because data fields are used internally in a process, and parameters are in this case, inputs from an external process (for more information, see Data Fields and Parameters).
Receive tasks can be paired with a send task or message event to form a request response operation.You must also ensure that incoming messages are received by the correct process instance. For more information, see Correlation Data.
Reference Tasks
Reference tasks refer to another task and prevent you from having to duplicate the same task several times in a process.
 
You can create a reference to another task using either the Reference Task gadget on the reference task, or in the Properties view for the reference task.
Activity Markers
You can select BPMN Activity Markers on the Properties of the activity. The currently selected Activity Marker is indicated by the following symbols on the activity:
Multiple Instance Loop   Indicates a task or sub-process that is replicated a fixed number of times based on the evaluation of an expression. The ordering can be either parallel or sequential.
Standard Loop   Indicates a task or sub-process that may have more than one instance, depending on the conditions of the loop. A standard loop consists of a Boolean expression that is evaluated before or after each cycle of the loop. If the expression evaluates to True, the loop continues.
The conditions of the loop are set on the Loops tab (for more information, see Loops).
Ad-hoc   Indicates an embedded sub-process that contains activities that have no pre-defined sequence. This also means that the number of times the activities are repeated is completely determined by the performers of the activities and cannot be defined beforehand.
Presentation Channels
Presentation channels control how tasks will be displayed to the user after deployment.
When you use Presentation Channels, you can choose between Workspace Google Web Toolkit, Openspace Email and Openspace Google Web Toolkit which are provided by default. You can also choose to add channel types, or create your own presentation channel. See the TIBCO Business Studio BPM Implementation Guide for more information.

Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved