Edit

Add nested Business Processes

When designing a BP, you can include another BP in it. The capability allows you to reuse process designs and improves BP testing, monitoring, and visualization.

Prepare

To use a BP as a nested process, complete the following steps:

1. Create a Business Process from an existing or empty Operation.
2. Test the BP in the development environment and fix any errors if needed.
3. Create an Operation from the BP.

As a result, the BP Operation appears on the side panel of the BP Designer. From the panel, you can also copy the Operation. To make the Copy button visible, hover over the Operation name.

Add BP Operation as sub-process

Let's assume that you designed an OCR Business Process, tested it, and created an Operation. Our aim is to include this OCR Operation as a nested process into the Invoice Data Extraction BP. For that, perform the following actions:

1. In BP Designer, navigate to the Sub-Process tab and drag the OCR Operation from the side panel to the canvas.
2. Connect the OCR sub-process to other BP steps.
3. Verify that the BP input file column names match the OCR sub-process data elements (variables).

Edit sub-process

After you add a sub-process to a BP, the following inheritance rules apply:

• If you edit a sub-process step (parameters, name, and so on), the source Operation is updated accordingly, and vice versa.
• If you change the connections inside a sub-process, the source Operation is NOT updated, and vice versa.

If you want to change a sub-process step without affecting the source Operation, follow the instruction below:

1. Expand the sub-process by clicking + in its top left corner.

   

2. Right-click the target step and select the Copy action.

   

3. Delete the target step.

4. Drag the copied step inside the sub-process and connect the step to others. You can also delete other sub-process steps or drag new steps inside it if needed.

   

important

• WorkFusion supports multiple BP nesting levels.
• Sub-processes do not have their own BP options (streaming threshold, due date) and input data file. They receive data from the preceding BP step and pass the result data to the subsequent one.

Explore alternatives solutions

Instead of adding a sub-process, you can also try the following solutions:

• Configure a bot step that creates or updates a specific folder on an external server registered as described in Start task and Business Process from Data Source, and this event will start a new BP or task.
• You can use the task-start plugin to start another BP or task, depending on the current BP results.