BTS activities and processes

An activity is the BTS unit of execution. It holds the environment for an instance of the BTS equivalent of program execution. A process consists of a collection of one or more activities, and is the biggest entity recognized by BTS.

The state of a BTS activity is stored on disk and reinstantiated in memory as required. Typically, it represents one of the actions of a business transaction.

Activities can be hierarchically organized, in a tree structure that may be several layers deep. The activity at the top of the hierarchy is called the root activity . An activity that starts another activity is known as a parent activity . An activity that is started by another is known as a child activity . For example, if activity A starts activity B, B is a child of A; A is the parent of B. Notice that—with the exception of the root activity, which has no parent—an activity can be both a parent and a child.

A process is the biggest entity recognized by BTS. It consists of a collection of one or more activities. It always contains a root activity. When a process is run, the program that implements its root activity receives control. Typically, a process is an instance of a business transaction.

Processes can be categorized, using the PROCESSTYPE option of the DEFINE PROCESS command. All the activities in a process inherit the same PROCESSTYPE attribute. Categorizing processes makes it easier to find a particular process—the BTS browsing commands allow filtering by process-type.