Priority for Automatic Proccesses in Oracle BPM 10.3

Question

Hi,
I'm completely new to the BPM space, and I was just transferred to a team that's using Oracle BPM 10.3, so my apologies if this is a trivial question.
Does anyone know how to implement priority for automatic activities in Oracle BPM 10.3? Basically, I want high priority instances to be processed before low priority ones.
I tried kicking off several instances in a loop with the "priority" variable set to different values, with an automatic activity that would log the instance and its priority, and the begin state limiting the process to a single concurrent instance at a time. It did not look like these instance were processed in priority order.
Thanks!

Answer 1

The priority predefined variable is an integer that goes from 1 to 5. The visible corresponding values for these integer values when shown to the end user in the WorkSpace run from "Lowest" (1) to "Highest" (5).
You typically use priority in a view or filter for the Workspace. You'd set the priority column in the WorkSpace to be sorted descending so that the higher the priority, the closer it is to the top of the end user's queue.
Unless your view or filter is set to show all activity types currently in the process, the only work item instances shown in the WorkSpace are Interactive activities . The benefit to setting a priority to work item instances is that the end users are encouraged to work the interactive work item instances from the top of the list down.
Bottom line is that the priority predefined variable helps end users sort / prioritize their work, but does not cause the engine to sort the work it has to do with work item instances running in Automatic activities.
If you have a batch fully automatic process that takes a while to run, I could see a use case where you might want to sort the list of incoming work item instances. If it's a typical process with a mix of automatic and interactive activities, automatic actiivities take a much smaller percentage of time than the interactives do. Work item instances running inside automatic activities normally don't take much time and the need for prioritization doesn't come up. What's your use case where you need to prioritize them?
Dan