Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Persisting long running processes
The main reason we need to persist processes is because they are yet to be finished. From a
process' perspective, we say that the process is still active, which means its business goal
hasn't been accomplished yet. This means that the process is still running from its internal
perspective; however, from a more technical view (and if we are using asynchronous work
item handlers), the process is going to be waiting for some external interaction, either a hu-
man interaction or a system interaction. To understand these wait states, consider the fol-
lowing process flow:
As you can see in the preceding process definition flow, the first thing a process instance
will do is execute the
Start
event, and then the User task
User Interaction 1
will be star-
ted. However, since it is an actual human interaction, it will be waiting for the user to com-
actions
, this will leave the process instance in an active state, and wait for the user interac-
tion to be finished to continue with the process execution. The following process flow
shows how this interaction will look from a technical perspective:
