Activities

An activity is work that the company performs within a business process. An activity can be a task (atomic) or a sub-process (a compound, also referred to as non-atomic). A sub-process is a standalone workflow, which has its own start event and end event.

You specify the activity type in the Properties view.

The following table lists available task markers.

Marker	Notation	Description
Task		A Task is a discrete item of work. It is the lowest level of activity, one that cannot be further divided into smaller components.
Standard Loop		A Standard Loop activity will have a Boolean expression that is evaluated after each cycle of the loop. If the expression is still True, then the loop will continue.
Multiple Instances		Multi-Instance loops reflect the programming construct for each. The loop expression for a Multi-Instance loop is a numeric expression evaluated only once before the activity is performed. The result of the expression evaluation will be an integer that will specify the number of times that the activity will be repeated.
Compensation		A Task with Compensation associates the task to another element in the model. It occurs outside the normal flow of the process and is based on an event triggered by the failure of a transaction. An activity that might require compensation could be one that charges a buyer for some service and debits a credit card to do so. These activities usually need a separate activity to counter the effects of the initial activity. Often, a record of both activities is required, so this is another reason that the activity is not “undone.” An Intermediate Event of type Compensation is attached to the boundary of an activity to indicate that compensation may be necessary for that activity.