You can assign a process as performer of an activity to create a Subprocess workstep. At runtime, the parent process (which contains the subprocess workstep) and one of the subprocesses (if any) communicate with each other—the parent process may send data to the subprocess and the subprocess in turn sends data back to the parent process. A subprocess can receive one or more parameters as input and can return one or more values to the parent process.
You can define a parent process as a subprocess in a different application. There is no limit on the number of processes that are nested within a Subprocess workstep created in BPM Designer.
Important: For Web applications, the parent process and the subprocess must share the same HTTP session. Since Web applications have light weight persistency between Web pages using the HTTP session, no communication is possible if they do not share the session.
A parent process identifies a subprocess by its name, or “signature”, and must provide the expected names for both input and output data.
To define the method “signature”, you must define the subprocess and specify the name and number of values which are expected as input and which values are returned to the parent process. If the names of the dataslots in the parent process match the names of the dataslots in the subprocess, default mapping occurs and you do not need to map the dataslots. However, it is more common occurs that these names do not match, and which you need to map the relevant dataslots. For more information, see Mapping dataslots in a subprocess workstep.
Note: Properties view for Subprocess worksteps in BPM processes have more features than those for Web Applications. In the following sections, only Properties view for Subprocess worksteps in Business Processes are described, unless otherwise stated .
Click the Subprocess workstep to view its properties in the Properties view, which includes five tabs (Properties view in Web applications contains four tabs).
