Parent Activities Used in Pairs

You can use specific parent activities to bracket other activities in the Graphical Process Modeler.

The following list describes the BPML icons in the GPM that represent activities used to bracket other activities:

The Start activity indicates the beginning of a business process. Every business process model must begin with Start.

The End activity indicates the end of a business process. Every business process model must finish with End.

The All Start activity is a parent activity in a business process. All Start indicates that a business process is simultaneously executing all of the child activities contained within the parent activity.

The All activity runs two or more complex child activities within a business process simultaneously. Because there are performance implications to using the All activity, use it only if you expect branches of your business process model to take significant amounts of time (in seconds or minutes) to complete (very few services take this long).

Do not use the All activity to run two or more instances of the same subprocess simultaneously. The system will handle the proper load balancing.

The All End activity indicates that all child activities within the parent activity are completed. Use All End to finish All Start.

The Choice Start activity is a parent activity in a business process. Choice Start indicates a decision and runs one child activity as a result of that decision. You must assign a name to Choice Start using the Property editor and assign rules using the Rule Manager.

The Choice End activity indicates that the child activity that ran as a result of the parent activity is completed. Use Choice End to finish Choice Start.

The Sequence Start activity is a parent activity in a business process. Sequence Start runs a series of child activities in the order in which they are listed within the parent activity. When using Sequence Start, you must assign a name using the Property editor.

The Sequence End activity indicates that the last child activity in a series of child activities in the parent activity is finished. Use Sequence End to finish Sequence Start.