Activities

Activities are the individual units of work in a process.

Activities generally interact with an external system and perform a task. Activities that perform similar tasks are grouped in an entity called a palette. TIBCO Business Studio for BusinessWorks provides various technology-specific palettes using which you can build a business process.

Each activity in a palette is represented by an icon. For example, the activity is represented by the icon. For example, the database update activity is represented by the icon. Often an activity icon is also decorated with an additional symbol such as a green or a yellow pause sign to indicate the activity waits for an event, an arrow to indicate the direction of the data flow, and so on. For example, the arrow sign in the JMS Send Message icon indicates data is being sent by this activity.

Activities can be classified into three types:

• Regular Activities perform a specific task. Regular activities can have input and output in addition to their configuration. Activities can also state the faults they can throw at runtime. This allows the process to be designed to handle these faults and perform the necessary actions. Regular activities can be further classified into synchronous and asynchronous activities.

  Synchronous activities are blocking. They block the execution of the process until the activity task completes. Signal-in activities are always blocking.

  Asynchronous activities are non-blocking. They perform a task asynchronously without blocking the execution of a process.

• Process Starter Activities are configured to react to events. They trigger the execution of a process when the event occurs. Process starter activities can have only outputs in addition to their configuration. For example, the HTTP Receiver process starter activity starts a process when an HTTP request is received.
• Signal-in Activities wait for an asynchronous event in a process. They proceed with executing the process instance when an appropriate event is received. Signal-in activities require conversations to be configured. For more information, see Conversations.