Process that takes 6 months to finish

Question

My quesiton is on performance when having a process open for extended amount of time.
For example a tuition reimbursment process. A user enters his data at the beginning of the school year to get approval for his course work.
Once approved the process would sit dorment until the user came back at the end of the year to enter in his grades and attach is transcripts and then submit for final approval.
Would this pose issue or would all this be persisted in the DB and have no impact?

Answer 1

If you're on Oracle BPM 10g, there are two ways you can set a deadline.
1) For a deadline at the individual activity level, you can add a due transition to the Interactive activity and set this to 6 months. Once 6 months have passed and the instance is still in the same activity, the instance will flow from the activity through the the Due transition to the next activity.
2) For a deadline at the entire process level, you can set the predefined variable "deadline" to sometime in the future (e.g. 'now' + '6m'). No matter where the work item instance is located in the process, after 6 months, the engine would throw an "InstanceExpiration" exception for the instance. The instance would flow to the exception handler. The deadline for the whole process is determined by what you set the "deadline" predefined variable to. This can be set anywhere inside the process as early as the Begin activity.
To set it differently for different instances use a time interval variable or a business parameter. Here's an example. Say you have different service level agreements (SLAs) for different category levels of customers. Platinum level customers are 2 days, gold level customers are 4 days, silver customers are 6 days. In a method you might then have the logic:
if customer.level = "Platinum" then
    // DEADLINE_HOURS_PLATINUM is an integer Business Parameter set initially to 2 days
    deadline = 'now'.addHours(i : DEADLINE_HOURS_PLATINUM)
elseif customer.level = "Gold" then
    deadline = 'now'.addHours(i : DEADLINE_HOURS_GOLD)
elseif customer.level = "Silver" then
    deadline = 'now'.addHours(i : DEADLINE_HOURS_SILVER)
else
    // no deadline for the process
    deadline = null
endHope this helps,
Dan