Properties of an Activity Within a Transaction

This topic describes the properties that you can assign to an Activity that is within a transaction.

It is essential to understand the different properties that you can assign to an Activity, so that you can use them effectively to build transactions.

An Activity (or a sub-process wherein the Short Lived Process property is selected) will participate in the transaction if the Participate in Transaction property is selected. If there is an exception at any stage, all activities that are marked Participate in Transaction are rolled back. A method will not be a part of the transaction if this property is modified and set tofalse, although it forms a part of the transaction.

If a short-lived process consisting of WS-AppServer activities is called from a transaction of a long-lived process, the WS-AppServer activities in the short-lived process should be grouped as part of the transaction to maintain the transaction context. By default, for a WS-AppServer activity that is outside the transaction the Participate in Transaction property is set tofalseand disabled.

For example, suppose there are four update activities defined in a transaction:

Transaction Start

Activity A WS-AppServer method, Participate in Transaction =true

Activity B WS-AppServer method, Participate in Transaction =false

Activity C Web Service, Participate in Transaction =false

Activity D WS-AppServer method, Participate in Transaction =true

Transaction End

If Activity D throws an exception, Activity A is rolled back but Activities B and C are not rolled back.

Note: An End event within a transaction has an additional option Abort. Ensure that the End event is inside the transaction before you set this option. When an exception occurs, the transaction is automatically aborted. Hence, you do not need to model an End event of type Abort after the exception handling.