Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Sequence flows are the standard way of providing a sequence in business processes, and
they are fully supported by jBPM6.
Finally, the relationship between these data components, the process, and its flow objects
is done using message flows. They represent an association between a data object and a
flow object. The specification mandates that message flows don't affect the process execu-
tion flow, and they only provide a way to share information between a source and a target.
The specification also allows transformations to be applied by using expressions, as
shown in the following diagram:
Data elements
Data elements represent information that will be manipulated by the process instance dur-
ing its execution. BPMN 2.0 allows us to define this information graphically and to speci-
fy where the data will be used. Data objects can be divided into the following:
• Data objects
• Data inputs and data outputs
• Data stores
• Properties (no visual representation)
Data objects are the most basic representation of a piece of information used in a process.
They can be added to processes and subprocesses and can be associated with their life
cycle. That means, when our processes are instantiated, we can instantiate our data objects
as well. We can mark data objects to be a single instance or a collection, as shown in the
following diagram:
