Adding a decision task to a service flow
A decision task provides a means to include decision logic in your service flow. You can
use decision tables and action rules to author your decision logic by using
Business Action Language (BAL). You can also export your decision logic for use in IBM® Operational Decision
Manager.
Tip: For an example of how to use a decision task in a process application, and how to implement the
decision logic using an action rule or a decision table, see the developerWorks article A tutorial on decisions in process applications: action rules and decision
tables.
About this task
The following steps describe how to add a decision task to a service flow and then adding decision tables or action rules to the decision task.
Procedure
- Open the process application in the designer.
- Create a service flow, and give it a name, for example
ExpenseApprovalRequired
. - In the diagram of the new service flow, click the down
arrow of the Activity icon in the component palette to open the sub-palette
and drag the decision icon (
) from the palette onto the service flow diagram.
- In the Properties tab, enter a name for the new decision task.
- Connect the activity with the Start and End events.
- Click the Variables tab.
- For each input and output variable to the service flow that you need, click the + sign next to the variables section, then in the Name field, replace the default name with a more meaningful name, and click Select next to Variable type and select the type from the list.
- Click the Decisions tab to open the rules editor.
- Select your decision task.
- If you want to add a decision table to the decision task, perform the steps described in Using decision tables
- If you want to add an action rule to the decision task, perform the steps described in Using action rules
Results
Tip: To
learn more about BAL rules and accessibility, see the IBM Operational Decision
Manager knowledge
center topics:
Restriction: The following
variable types cannot be used with Business Action Language (BAL)
rules in decision tasks: ConditionalActivity, IndexedMap, Map, NameValuePair,
Record, SLAViolationRecord, SQLDatabaseType, SQLParameter, SQLResult,
SQLResultSetColumn, SQLResultSetRow, SQLStatement, TWHolidaySchedule,
TWTimePeriod, TWTimeSchedule, TWWorkSchedule, TaskListData, TaskListItem,
TaskListProperties, TaskListFilterProperties, TaskListSortBySelectionType,
XMLDocument, XMLElement, and XMLNodeList.
Restriction: You
can switch the language of the rule editor in the Decisions section
of the User Preferences dialog of Process Designer,
but only the following languages are supported:
- German (de)
- English U.S. (en)
- Spanish (es)
- French (fr)
- Italian (it)
- Japanese (ja)
- Korean (ko)
- Dutch (nl)
- Polish (pl)
- Portuguese-Portugal (pt)
- Portuguese-Brazilian (pt-br)
- Russian (ru)
- Swedish (sv)
- Chinese-Simplified (zh)
- Chinese-Traditional (zh-tw)