Chapter 6. Concepts

Table of Contents

6.1. Terminology
6.2. Package
6.2.1. LifeCycle
6.2.2. Versioning
6.3. Process
6.3.1. Process Basics
6.3.2. Life Cycles (process/instance)
6.3.3. Processes (aka models) & process Instances
6.3.4. Versioning
6.3.5. Concept of Hooks
6.3.6. SubProcesses
6.4. Activities
6.4.1. Activity Basics

6.1. Terminology

As Bonita is XPDL compliant, refer for more details to the terminology defined within XPDL.

  • A package issued from XPDL acts as a container for main workflow objects that can be shared by multiple workflow processes. .

  • A process (called Workflow Process into XPDL) contains the elements that make up a workflow: activities, data fields, patrticipants, transitions, .....

  • An activity is the base workflow entity to build a process. It contains others sub entities that will determine the behavior of the activity (the implementaion : no or subflow, the start mode: manual/automatic, the performer, the performer assignment, the transition restrictions : Split or Join).

  • A task is a runtime object created for specific activity type also called manual activity. Workflow tasks should be manage by an independant module receiving tasks from other applications.

  • A participant is one of the following type: system, human, role. It is defined within a task.

  • A transition is a dependency expressing an order constraint between two activities.

  • A variable (called Workflow Relevant Data into XPDL) is a workflow unit of data. Variables can be local to an activity or global to the process.

  • A hook is user defined logic adding automatic or specific behavior to activities and workflow processes

  • A mapper is a unit of work allowing dynamic role resolution each time an activity with human task behavior is created (instantiated).

  • A performer assignment is a unit of work adding additional activity assignment rules at run time.

For most of the entities defined here before, definition data, runtime recorded data, archived data are managed within the engine. To easily play with these three aspects that characterizes workflow entities Bonita has introduced UUID ( universally unique identifier). Each type of data has its own typed UUID that can be used within operations of the facade API.