Plan for Business Process Development

Before you develop a business process, consider its design, including the overall flow of the business process, and types of services that must be included in the business process.

The tasks required to build a business process can be done at different times during the design process. For example, you may want to identify and define services before you begin modeling your process. You may also want to create data transformation maps that you anticipate using in the process model.

Conversely, you could lay out the high-level business logic using the Service editor and later add services and create maps. Placeholder activities can be created and defined later in the design phase. For example, one user could create a complex activity container as a placeholder in the process. This complex activity could contain resources that need properties, correlation sets, or a monitor service defined. A second, probably more technical user, can later define the required resources. After the business process design is complete and tested, it is packaged and is then available for configuration and deployment to the runtime instance.

Consider the following when developing a service:

Message services – If your business process service design includes calls to a message service, it is recommended that you develop the message service using the complex type instead of simple type datatype property. Using a complex type datatype allows you to select the schema element in the xsd structure. Designing the message service using the xsd schema element allows better control over the exact content of the output message from the message service.
Support for the simple type datatype does provide a convenient method to assign operation parameters when developing a message service, however, during runtime a synthetic schema element is generated. Consider how the message output by the message service is consumed and what requirements the message must meet in determining whether to use simple type.

Note: When a message service is developed using a simple type datatype property for the operation parameter, and the message service is called from a business process, the output message contains the synthetic element tags as generated by the message producer in addition to the element content.
Transactionality – Determine if the business process will contain transactional resources , such as a database or message service. If so, you must define the service endpoint properties to be XA-compliant.