What is an Interactive Activity?

Interactive Activities allow you to add user interaction to a process model.

Within the BSO (Business Service Orchestration), it facilitates the interaction of human participants.

It manages multiple Methods to automatically invoke components that require end user interaction. Its Method can be as complicated as needed in order to accomplish a task, and each Interactive activity can contain multiple tasks. Tasks are a list of functions that can be performed while an instance is in the activity. Each task may or may not be required or repeatable. See Tasks for further information.

Using the Interactive Activity

The following table outlines some of the considerations when using the Interactive Activity within ALBPM Studio.

WorkSpace	The Interactive activity is visible in WorkSpace, but only to the participant(s) assigned to the role where the Interactive activity exists.
Roles	Interactive activities must reside in user-defined roles. Note: If you add a new interactive activity and drop it in an automatic role, the BPM system will allow you to select an existing user-defined role or generate a new one (the Role dialog box populates.) The column-role is added to the design and the new interactive activity will automatically appear in the selected role.
Variables	Interactive activities can access argument, instance, local and predefined variables from the Method.
Pre Conditions	An Incoming instance from another activity in the process with the necessary instance variables set. Interactive activities can also be used as an exception handler. In this case, the Interactive activity receives an incoming instance from an activity in which the BP-Method has thrown a user-defined exception. See Exception overview for further information.
Post Conditions	Instance moves to the next activity in the process via one of the outgoing transition lines.
Transitions	One or more incoming and outgoing transitions are required.
Tasks	The default behavior for Interactive Activities consists in having one single Implementation or task. This greatly simplifies the understanding of Interactive Activities. Furthermore, this simplifies the operation of WorkSpace, since executing an instance is ALWAYS executing its implementation. However, you can have Optional (or support) tasks that the participant may need to execute in some cases in order to help him do the required work (that is, executing the main task.) But if you look at optional tasks in this way, they make sense ONLY if you allow the user to execute them while executing the main task. To do so, these optional tasks must be read-only, meaning that they must not modify the instance data in order to avoid inconsistencies. The tasks have to be defined by the developer. The interactive activity has then a main task. Moreover, optional tasks can be added. See Tasks.
Business Process Methods	Interactive activities can have one or more BP-Methods defined as tasks. Applications invoked from Interactive activities are sent incoming parameters (set by BP-Method variables) and return outgoing parameters (which set BP-Method variables).