Additional General Concepts
This section introduces the following additional concepts that help build complex business processes.
- Groups
Groups consist of one or more activities that are assembled together and executed according to their type. - Properties
Properties are used to define configuration. Depending on where and how they are defined and qualified, properties can be classified into application properties, module properties, shared module properties, and process properties. The values for all three kinds of properties can be of one of the six primitive types (Boolean, Integer, DateTime, Long, Password, or String) or one of the available default shared resource type. These values are static and cannot be changed once an application has started execution. These values can only be changed at design time or deployment time. - Shared Variables
Shared variables are used to save the state, either at the module level or for the duration of a job. - Event Handlers
Event handlers are used to overcome issues with interruptive and blocking activities. - Fault Handlers
Errors (or faults) can occur when executing a process. Fault handlers allow you to catch faults or exceptions and create fault-handling procedures to deal with potential runtime errors in your process definitions. - Components
Components implement a process and provide information to the runtime on how to instantiate the process. - Services
Modeled processes can function both as a server and a client in a web services interaction. Services and references are defined at the process level while the bindings are created at the component level. - SOAP Services
SOAP services are web services that use SOAP as the standard communication protocol for XML-based message exchanges. - REST Services
Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architectural style of the World Wide Web that is used in building services for distributed systems and networked applications. RESTful APIs are increasingly preferred for enterprise, web and mobile integration use cases.