Book Image

Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics

Book Image

Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics

Overview of this book

Oracle BPM Suite is a popular and highly capable business process management system with extensive integration capabilities. BPMN, one of the most widely used process modeling notations, includes advanced capabilities for inter-process communication, working of arrays of data, and handling exceptions. However, these very same areas are often poorly understood. This book gives you the knowledge to create professional process models using these advanced features of BPMN."Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics" is the only book available that provides coverage of advanced BPMN topics for Oracle BPM Suite, helping to fill in the gaps left by the product documentation, and giving you the information that you need to know to use BPMN to its full potential.This book covers the important theory behind inter-process communication, working with arrays and handling exceptions in BPMN, along with detailed, step-by-step practical exercises that demonstrate and consolidate this theoretical knowledge.Throughout the book we'll cover topics including different types of sub-processes, initializing and manipulating arrays, using the multi-instance embedded sub-process, fault propagation and more.With "Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics" in hand, you'll gain detailed and practical experience in using the advanced features of BPMN to create professional BPMN processes with Oracle BPM.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Oracle BPM Suite 11g: Advanced BPMN Topics
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Inter-process Communication

Welcome to our exploration of some of the advanced topics in BPMN. When we set out to write this book, we chose the areas where we see the most confusion and difficulty in understanding how to use BPMN. Over the next five chapters, we will look at how process instances can communicate, how exceptions are handled and propagated, and how to deal with data in arrays. We will present theory and also build practical exercises together so that you can see how the theory is applied. Let's start our journey by building an understanding of inter-process communication.

Inter-process communication refers to the ability for instances of processes to communicate with other instances of the same process, with instances of other processes, and with services. Such communication is usually implemented so that process instances can work collaboratively to achieve a given goal. Common scenarios when this may occur include:

  • When common logic is extracted from a number of processes into a reusable "utility" process

  • When the occurrence of an event in one process means that another, perhaps separate, process needs to be started—this is often seen where the second process is an audit or investigation process

  • Where a process has a set of data, needs to run a common set of logic over each item in that data set, and then consolidate the results

  • Through normal decomposition of a business process into various levels of granularity, resulting in the need for the process to invoke one or more sub-processes to accomplish its work

There are different mechanisms available for processes to communicate with each other. In this chapter, we will explore the options and when we should employ each.