Workflow Process Steps

The standardization of these process steps is important because it gives you the flexibility to define a workflow and each step in a manner that is most effective and relevant to a specific process and the needs of your business. However, for a workflow as a whole to be functional, you must add activities into the process steps. See Activities Used to Create Workflows for information on building your workflow definition.

The process steps described below run during a workflow instance at least once; however, the process flow is modified when:

• an unhandled fault occurs;
• the workflow is configured to run continuously; or
• the workflow instance stops manually.

When an unhandled fault occurs, the current subprocess ends at the fault, but the workflow instance ends in the normal way. That is, the postsubprocess, postprocess, and unload steps run before the instance completes.

When a workflow runs in a continuous loop, the load step runs once during its first execution cycle. For subsequent cycles, the workflow repeats the process cycle starting with the preprocess step and continues through the postprocess step. The load step does not run again. The continuous loop cycle continues in this way until the process is shutdown or an unhandled fault occurs. At this point, the unload step runs and the workflow instance ends.

A workflow instance can also be stopped while it is running. The workflow is halted in a controlled manner, but it is still live, which means that it still available to run by restarting it.