Using Message Maps |
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A Message Map is a container of all messages flowing in (input) and out (output) of a business process model. It specifies how information is communicated from one activity to another. Message maps help transform data during process flow. It is essential to do message mapping for business processes and case management models to ensure that message flow from one activity to another or next activity prevails and execute these models without any interruption.
The Message Map holds values of variables and attributes accessed by other activities of the process. Whenever the process instance receives a new message, it is added to the Message Map. All the request and response messages are always available in a Message Map.
Note:
Consider a human interaction activity with a listbox or a table that has 10 records. If you select only two records and complete the activity, the response of completing the activity sends all the 10 records and the selected records' business object is associated with an attribute to distinguish it from the unselected records.
You can create process specific messages in the Message Map. Also, you can assign input data to a business process model using the Message Map.
Structure of a Message Map
A Message Map includes two views - Activity View and Consolidated View.
In the Activity view, the Message Map comprises two tabs, Pre-Assignment and Post-Assignment used for message map assignments. Each of these tabs has three columns:
Activities can be identified by the adjoining icons used in order to differentiate whether it is a Web service, or a Decision construct, or a While loop or a Start Event.
Source |
Assignments |
Target |
|---|---|---|
The Source column displays the list of all available elements whose values can be used during process execution by assigning them to the target. Process Specific Messages: Process Specific Messages are used to create messages and to drag-drop schema fragments created in the project. Instance Properties: A property that is instantiated in the Message Map to provide instance specific properties. The Instance Specific Properties are used to retrieve information about the process instances at runtime, and can be used in process definitions. |
Assignments: Includes the mappings made between the source and target elements. It specifies how a source value can be assigned to a target.A map is created by dragging a source from the left tree and the target from the right tree. |
The Target value is an element to which a value is provided at runtime. This column lists only the input messages of the currently selected activity.Process Identifiers: Displays the process related identifiers that are used as searchable attributes. Process Specific Messages. |
The Consolidated view lists all the message map assignments created between the various Source and Target elements.