Terminate Idle Processes
When you design a Process that stays idle for a long time, it may have a negative impact on the deployment of applications. This is essentially due to:
-
Process instances that stay active for a long time cause accumulation of information in the database;
-
During the deployment, the impact analysis goes over all the information about active process instances, thus taking more time.
In this case, we recommend that you do the following:
-
Analyze the process flow and identify points where the process stays idle for a long time;
-
Use the Decision tool to control the process execution at these points:
-
First Execution: end the process, and save information for resuming it like, for example, the date and time for it to be resumed and information to know where to resume;
-
Resumed Execution: skip activities in the flow until the point where the process is to be resumed.
-
Set a way of launching the resuming processes using one of the following techniques:
-
A Timer;
-
Another process;
-
An action on the screen.
Example
As an example, imagine a process that monthly collects movements of credit cards and sends them to each customer by e-mail. Then, the customer has six months to make a claim for wrong movements. Most of the times, customers make the claim in the first 3 days after receiving the e-mail.
The process stays active and idle for 6 months in the WaitForClaim activity. So, let's change the process flow and create a timer to resume the process:
-
The PrepareTimeout automatic activity is added to store all necessary information to resume the process;
-
The RedirectReport decision is added to control the flow in the following way:
-
First Execution: the path followed by the first execution of the process;
-
Claim: the path followed by the resuming process if the customer made a claim while the process was stopped;
-
Timeout: the path followed by the resuming process if there are no claims while the process was stopped.
-
This is an improvement to the process due to the fact that "Most of the times customers make a claim in the first 3 days after receiving the e-mail." This way, the process waits for 3 days (a short time) and if the customer makes a claim in the meanwhile, the process follows on normally without having to be stopped and resumed later on;
-
Create and set the ProcessWaitingReports timer to launch the processes to resume stopped processes.