Undercover agents

An undercover agent (UCA) is an artifact attached to a message event or a content event in a process or service flow. As part if its implementation, UCA can call a service flow to handle the event and process data inside the event.

An undercover agent is started by an event sent by a process or service flow, or by an external system. For example, when a message event is received from an external system, an undercover agent is needed if you want to start a process or run a service in response to the message.

Message events can originate from any of the following components:
  • processes or service flows
  • web services that you create
  • messages that you post to the JMS listener

When an undercover agent runs, it starts a process or affects the execution flow of a running process in response to the event.

When you use message event or a content event, you must attach an undercover agent to the event. For example, when a message event is received from an external system, an undercover agent is needed to trigger the message start event or an intermediate message event in a process in response to the message.