What is a Process Notification Activity?

Process Notification and Notification Wait activities work together to allow communication between processes. Process Instances pause at a Notification Wait activity until they receive notification from a corresponding Process Notification activity.

The Process Notification activity informs the instance waiting in a Notification Wait activity when the related instance has arrived at the activity. This notification releases the instance from the Notification Wait activity to continue its flow in the process.

The instances in both processes can either be related (sent by a Process Creation activity with the Keep relation with child process property selected) or not. If the instances are not related, some tracking means must be used (for example, a relational database) in order to match the instance ID of the instance you want to notify.

There are three scenarios where you can use the Process Notification and Notification Wait combination:

Parent/Child relationship.
Child/Parent relationship.
External relationship.

See Notification Wait Activity.

Note: In order to notify an instance, it must exist within the process. Not necessarily standing in a Notification Wait activity at the time of the notification. If you plan to notify an instance that might have not yet been created, design the send notification to be executed with the corresponding delay. If not an exception is raised

Using the Process Notifications Activity

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

WorkSpace	The Process Notification activity is not visible in WorkSpace.
Roles	Process Notification activities can reside in user-defined and automatic role lanes. However, if they are in user-defined roles, they will not appear in WorkSpace.
Variables	The Process Creation activity can define instance variables to determine the Argument Mapping. Note: Arguments are created in the Notification Wait activity.
Pre Conditions	There must be at least one incoming transition to the Process Notification activity.
Post Conditions	When an instance reaches a subprocess' Process Notification activity, it immediately sends a notification message to the corresponding Notification Wait activity. The message contains the arguments the Notification Wait activity is expecting (defined in the Argument Mapping. The subprocess' instance then continues on through one of the transitions leaving the Process Notification activity. The notification will wait for the success of the delivery before going through the right transition to the next activity.
Transitions	There can be one or more incoming transition(s) and one or more outgoing transition(s).
Tasks
Business Process Methods	No scripting is available. To pass arguments between processes, the Argument Mapping function is available.