Pausing and Starting a new Process

The Pause Process and Start functionality pauses a current process instance and starts a new process. The data associated with paused process is passed by copy to the newly started process. The paused process is coupled with the newly started process regarding its life-cycle. The newly started process contains a link to the originating one and vice-versa. These new process definitions can be all startable processes from all active models, including a new instance of the originally running process definition itself.

Common Usage Pattern

Consider a scenario of an organization that has implemented the Stardust Portal workflows to manage several of its mission critical business processes. After using the system for several months, the company notices that approximately 4% of the process instances are started but approval is pending for these processes. In this case, the operator would need to pause the current process and start approval process from that point. When the newly started approval process completes, the paused process becomes active. From there the workflow becomes regular.

Pausing a Current Process and Starting a new Process

Pausing and starting a new process is performed in the following sequence:

1. The Pause and Start a new process operation is initiated on the current process
2. A new process instance is started
3. Data from the current (in-scope) process instance is copied to the newly started process instance
4. The current process instance and its activities achieve the Halted state
5. A link is created from the current process instance to the newly started process instance and vice versa

Transitions of a Process and its Activity Instance

The user can complete or suspend activity instances in Application state even if a process hierarchy is Halted.

During the "Halting" of a process hierarchy, an interactive activity instance which is in Application state remains in Application state and:

• if completed, it achieves the Completed state and transition is not processed further until the process resumes the execution
• if completed as the last activity in a process, the process achieves the Completed state after resuming
• if suspended, it achieves the Suspended state including the history and then achieves the Halted state. Note that activities in Halted state are not available in the User/Role worklist.

This implies that the process instance may remain in Halted state for an indefinite time. Hence, note that the execution of the paused process instance is restarted only after completion of the inserted process instance.

You can halt already halted process. And when multiple started processes are completed after halting a process, the halted process becomes active again.

If the process is in halting state, no operation is allowed until it is Halted. Abort or any operation is performed once the process achieves the Halted state.

For more information, please refer the section Process Instance States and Activity Instance States of the Processes and Activities chapters, respectively.

Linked Processes

The newly started process is linked to the currently halted process. The link is an additional property of a process instance and influences the process hierarchy. An API is provided to retrieve the linking information from an existing process instance. Refer to chapter Pausing Workflow Processing for Spawned Processes of the Programming Guide for details.

The links are established from the current process instance to the newly started process instance and vice versa.

The following link types are created if the current process is paused until the newly started process reaches the state Complete:

• Link type for the current process is: Inserted Into
• Link type for the newly started process is: Inserted