Adding a Global Creation Activity

To use a process, there has to be a way of creating a process instance that will flow through it. One way to do this is with a global creation activity.

A global creation activity creates a process instance which will then start flowing from the Begin activity. It is called a global activity because it does not run from within an instance. Rather, it is executed outside of, and independent from, any existing instances.

In the Expense Report process, we use just one global creation activity, which we name Create Expense Report.

To add the Create Expense Report global creation activity:

In the process design editor, click on the Global Creation icon (). When you do this, do not hold the mouse button. The mouse cursor will go into insertion mode in the process design editor.
Insert the global creation activity in the Employee swimlane, towards the top (see the image below), by clicking on the insertion point. The Activity dialog box appears.
Enter Create Expense Report in the Name field. Note that the Activity ID, above the name field, is automatically completed to CreateExpenseReport. This is the name that will be used in code by developers.
Click OK. The Create Expense Report activity is created.

After completing this task, your process design diagram should look like this:

Figure 1. Create Expense Report Global Creation Activity