MessageWait

Question

In a process created in BPM studio 10g, between the final interactive activity and End activity, I put a MessageWait acitivty and add a due transition from MessageWait to the final Interactive activity. This process also has an exception transition to the End activity.
I refer the example of CorrelationsExample-Accept Invoice. However, Studio does not alllow to do that. Below is the error message.
How to add a messagewait and let the participant know that they need to do something?
Thanks.
------------------------error------------------------------------------
The project publication has failed. Reason: There is a transition that allows the instance to pass through a notification wait activity of thype 'child process' ('MessageWait') without passing through its corresponding creation process. The erroneous tranistion comes from activity 'issue'.
Full flow sequence: List of activities passed through:
-Begin
-Reception
-Conditional
-sh
-issue
-MessageWait
Edited by: YE on May 8, 2009 11:50 AM

Answer 1

Hi Ye,
Understand the part about having a Message Wait activity just before the End activity.
Could you explain what you want to use it for? I'm guessing this might help debug the error you're getting. There are several different use cases that the Message Wait is used for. For example, here's one common scenario - are you using the Message Wait activity expecting a corresponding notification from a Send Message activity from a child subprocess spawned from this parent process? If this is case, have you set up the property for the Message Wait activity to be waiting for a notification from a Child subprocess and have you created a Send Message activity in the child subprocess with its property set to notify the parent's Send Message activity.
At a minimum, tell us the property settings you've given the the Message Wait activity. For example, if you've checked "allows interruptions" then the activity cannot be part of the main process flow. Also, if you have a Send Message activity in a called subprocess, could you tell us how you've defined its properties? If this is the case, how are you creating the instance in the subprocess? (e.g. Process Creation of Subflow or using logic)
Could you add a little more detail behind what you mean by "How to add a messagewait and let the participant know that they need to do something?". Again, it will depend on your use case. One scenario is if you want a child process to notify a parent, then the child process' work item instance will either flow into Send Message activity or hit logic "send Notfication..." that will cause the work item instance stuck in the parent's Message Wait activity to be released. Participants are usually oblivious to the fact that they are causing a notification to fire. They usually just know that they have selected and are working on a work item in their inbox. Once they complete their work on the instance, it's the process that causes the notifcation to fire. The participant is an innocent bystander at this point.
Hope this helps,
Dan