ActiveVOS Designer BPEL for People User’s Guide

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About Notifications

A notification is a WS-HT construct that relies on a WSDL interface, people assignments, and other details that are incorporated into a People activity. By itself a notification is not executable. It is designed to be used as an escalation action within a task or as the main construct of a People activity.

Unlike a task, a notification does not have an outcome. It relies on a one-way operation in a WSDL, serving to inform users of an event such as missed deadline or product ship date. Notifications usually are displayed in users’ task client application along with tasks. They could also be used in other forms, like email or text message, if you choose to create your own client applications.

The BPEL4People specification defines several ways that a People activity can incorporate a notification, as follows:

• An inline notification declared within the People activity. The notification can be used only by that People activity. For details, see Creating an Inline Task or Notification.
• A local notification declared within either the scope containing the People activity or the process scope. In this case, the notification can be reused as an implementation of multiple People activities enclosed within the scope containing the notification declaration. For details, see Adding a Task or Notification to the Outline View for Process or Scope Use.
• An escalation action for a task deadline. For details, see About Task Deadlines and Escalations
• (For future release.) A standalone notification identified using a QName. In this case the notification can be reused across multiple BPEL4People processes within the same environment.

A notification definition contains the following parts:

• Notification Name, Priority, and Interface
• Role Assignments for a Task or Notification
• Adding Task or Notification Presentation Properties
• Adding Rendering Details for a Task or Notification

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