Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Subprocess types in jBPM6
Activities can represent aggregations of multiple other flow paths, called subprocesses. The
reason behind grouping particular parts of a process together could be hiding or grouping
additional levels of a business process in detail or specifying a completely different way to
manage those paths. In the following diagram, we can see different icons that are used to
define some of these subprocess types:
A basic subprocess (in its collapsed view) will be marked by a plus sign at the bottom. This
is just to define that there is a different process definition inside this box. This type alone
gives us a lot of power, because it lets us define a process definition hierarchy to define
from the most atomic activities of our company to the general company drivers, all with
different levels of processes.
Alongside the basic subprocess, there are other types of subprocesses. The most common
ones are as follows:
•
Multiple instance (MI) subprocesses
: They define a subprocess that should be in-
stantiated and executed multiple times from the external process instance. It comes
in two flavors:
Parallel
(marked by three vertical lines at the bottom) and
Sequen-
tial
(marked by three horizontal lines instead). The iteration is done over a
collection-based process variable in the external process instance. Both types are
supported by jBPM6, but they are both treated as sequential.
•
Ad-hoc subprocesses
: This type of subprocesses is peculiar as it only contains
activities, and there is no sequence defined. Every activity included in the subpro-
cess can be executed in any order as long as specified completion conditions are
fulfilled. Actually, the internal activities of an ad hoc subprocess might not even
have to be executed at all to fulfill said conditions, making the whole subprocess
optional. They are represented with a tilde (
~
) marker at the bottom and are sup-
ported by jBPM6 through the dynamic node utilities:
