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Setting Up Background Workflow Engines

When the Workflow Engine initiates and performs a process, it completes all necessary activities before continuing to the next eligible activity. In some cases, an activity can require a large amount of processing resource or time to complete. Oracle Workflow lets you manage the load on the Workflow Engine by setting up supplemental engines to run these costly activities as background tasks. In these cases, the costly activity is deferred by the Workflow Engine and run later by a background engine. The main Workflow Engine can then continue to the next available activity, which may occur on some other parallel branch of the process.

A background engine must also be set up to handle timed out notification activities. When the Workflow Engine comes across a notification activity that requires a response, it calls the Notification System to send the notification to the appropriate performer, then sets the notification activity to a status of 'NOTIFIED' until the performer completes the notification activity. Meanwhile, a background engine set up to handle timed out activities periodically checks for 'NOTIFIED' activities and whether these activities have time out values specified. If a 'NOTIFIED' activity does have a time out value, and the current date and time exceeds that time out value, the background engine marks that activity as timed out and calls the Workflow Engine. The Workflow Engine then resumes by trying to execute a <Timeout> transition activity.

You can define and start up as many background engines as you like to check for deferred and timed out activities. Background engines can be restricted to handle activities associated with specific item types, and within specific cost ranges. A background engine runs until it completes all eligible activities at the time it was initiated. Generally, you should set the background engine up to run periodically by either using a script to restart the background engine periodically (for the standalone version of Oracle Workflow), or scheduling the Background Process concurrent program to resubmit periodically (for the version of Oracle Workflow embedded in Oracle Applications).

See Also

To Start a Background Engine

To Schedule Background Engines

To Set Engine Thresholds

Activity Cost

Timeout Transitions

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