Overview of Activities and Events

ActiveVOS Designer User’s Guide

Overview of Activities and Events

In the default (BPMN) Designer editing style, basic activities are organized according to BPMN types: activities and events. In BPEL, there is no distinction: both activities and events are considered activities.

The following table provides brief definitions and links to more details.


Activity Name	Description
Activities
Invoke	Directs a Web service to perform an operation
Assign	Manipulates process variables and partner link endpoint references by creating Copy From/To operations for them
Empty	An activity that does nothing when it executes. Useful for situations where you need an activity but do not want anything to really happen, for example, suppressing a fault by having the empty be the child of the catch.
Suspend	Suspends the process. Useful in a catch or catchAll event to catch unexpected errors.
Validate	Validates the values of variables against their associated XML and WSDL data definition
Opaque	For abstract processes. Stands as a placeholder for an activity that would be used in an executable process.
People	Create a BPEL for People activity. For details, see ActiveVOS BPEL for People Online Help
Events
Receive	Accepts message data from a service partner. Optionally begins a process by creating an instance of the process.
Reply	Sends a response to a partner identified in a matching Receive activity
Throw	Signals a fault. Specifies a standard or custom fault
Rethrow	Passes the fault that was originally caught by the immediately enclosing fault handler to the parent scope
Exit	Stops an executable process immediately
Wait	Stops process execution for a specified amount of time or until a deadline is reached
Compensate Scope	Starts compensation on a specified inner scope that has already completed successfully
Compensate	Executes the compensation handler on a named scope or executes the default compensation if no scope is named
Break	Breaks out of a loop in a while or for each activity. Processing continues normally with the next activity.
Continue	Continues with the next iteration in a loop (while, repeat until, or for each). A convenience activity that simplifies processing without the need of specifying all the conditions that may be required to continue normal processing when a certain condition is met.
Start/End/None	(BPMN only. ) Equivalent to the BPEL empty activity, described above.

For information on structured activities, see Different Ways of Structuring Activities.