What is a Subflow?

The Subflow Activity is used to call a subprocess, which is a different process that can exist internally to your organization or in a separate organization.

Subflows allow you to do the following::

Make a complex process more easily understood using the Subprocess activity to abstractly represent the underlying process.
Enable reuse - Subprocess activities (and therefore the underlying processes they represent) can be easily reused by many calling processes.
Enable Business-to-Business (B2B) communication between processes. When a process calls another process through a Subprocess activity, the called process can be run in another company behind their firewall.
Balance load, you can design subprocesses to distribute their execution among different servers to improve the performance and balance resources load.

Using the Subflow Activity

The following table outlines some of the considerations when using the Subflow Activity within a Process.

WorkSpace	The Subprocess activity is not visible in WorkSpace as any other automatic activity.
Roles	Subprocess activities can reside in user-defined and automatic role lanes
Variables	Instance variables can be used to fill in the arguments, as constant values or expressions can be used
Pre Conditions	Subprocess activities expect an incoming instance from another activity in the process. The Subprocess activity's 'create part' sets the called subprocess' incoming argument variables through the argument mapping. A new instance is created in the called subprocess
Post Conditions	The Subprocess activity's 'termination part' sets the returning argument into instance variables through the argument mapping. When the child instance finishes at its end activity, a notification is received by the subprocess activity and the parent instance variables are set based on the Argument Mapping. The parent instance moves to the next activity according to transition rules.
Transitions	Subprocess activities have one or more incoming transitions and one or more outgoing transitions
Tasks	No Tasks are available.
Business Process Methods	No scripting is available. To pass arguments between processes, the Argument Mapping function is available