Blog Posts Process Management Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

More On Essential And Redundant BPMN: Events

Blog: Process is the Main Thing - Anatoly Belychook

Last time we found out that only two of five BPMN gateways are absolutely necessary: XOR and AND.

Now let’s consider events. BPMN events are categorized by type (13 variants) and position (8 variants). Let’s consider event types:

1. None

Neither start nor end events are not strictly necessary – the diagram below is formally correct. Here Task 1 is the implicit start (no input flows), Task 2 is the implicit end (no output flows).

However such diagram looks incomplete and the question arises: was it done intentionally or it’s just a half-work? Therefore the good style supposes the start and end events to be always presented.

As for the intermediate none event, it depicts a process milestone. Not necessary yet useful and intuitive.

2. Link

If it came to the link event then probably it’s time for the decomposition – i.e. to leverage subprocesses. I’d recommend avoiding this event.

3. Timer

Helpful, intuitive, widely used in practice.

4. Conditional

Conditional event is helpful in certain scenarios yet it’s not the most intuitive. One of BPMN benefits is that, if used properly, it’s comprehensible by users without special trainings. It won’t be the case if conditional event is used.

The second issue is that it isn’t supported by most process engines. (In fact I haven’t seen a single one yet.)

But it isn’t that sad: conditional event can be replaced by a timer combined with XOR gateway:

=
=

Potential problems of such replacement are excessive engine load and messing the execution log.

5. Message

The major inter-process communication tool (along with data-based communications).

6. Signal

Signal is different from messages in two aspects. First, message is point-to-point while signal is publication-subscribtion. If one needs to connect a sender with a number of receivers then a signal can be replaced by a looped send task:

=

Secondly, message assumes tight while signal – loose coupling. In order to instantiate process B from process A via a message, one needs to have process B model ready:

It’s not the case if signal is used – A and B models may be developed independently. What they they only need to know about each other is the signal name and the payload format, optionally:

When dealing with a complex system of processes, this signal feature becomes much valuable.

There is a workaround for signal in this scenario, too:

Here process A sets a flag in the datastore and process B checks it periodically. If flag isn’t set then B ends, otherwise it resets the flag and proceeds to the core job.

7. Terminate

8. Error

9. Escalation

These three events are more or less interchangeable:

=
=

Escalation has a valuable feature – it can create a new token and launch an async control flow in the outer process scope with the help of intermediate escalation initiator and non-interrupting boundary catcher.

10. Multiple

It’s relatively easy to workaround this event.

Catcher:

=

Initiator:

= =

11. Parallel multiple

It’s quite easy to workaround the parallel multiple event if there are just two events:

=

However in case of many events we’d run into the combinatorial explosion with this technique. Yet in practice I didn’t ever need even two start events. An if I did, I’d use CEP (Complex Event Processing) instead of BPMN.

12. Cancel

13. Compensation

Cancel and compensation events, transactional subprocess and compensation tasks are quite useful in a special scenario “all or nothing”. An example: I’m going to go to the conference. To be prepared, I need: 1) get my submission accepted by the conference committee, 2) book the plane, 3) book the hotel, 4) get my company’s approval on the expenses. It’d be better to perform all the activities in parallel – the less time available, the lower chances to succeed. Every single activity may not succeed and in this case a non-trivial set of compensating activities should be performed, e.g. if the submission was rejected and the plane was booked then the booking should be cancelled etc.

Transactions subprocesses and compensations provide an elegant solution to this kind of tasks. However they are relatively rare so one may not care about transactions and compensations most of the time.

Summary: from total number of 13 event types –

Now let’s consider event categories by position, using message as example:

1. Start

2. End

3. Intermediate initiator

4. Intermediate catcher

These four are essential.

5. Attached event interrupting

Helpful, intuitive, popular.

6. Attached event non-interrupting

Not very intuitive. Can be workarounded, more or less:

=

7. Event subprocess interrupting

8. Event subprocess non-interrupting

Event subprocesses are very similar to attached events. The major difference is that unlike event subprocess, one can’t attach an event to the top-level process. However it’s always possible to make a subprocess from the top-level flow:

Conclusions

Summing up, 5 event positions from 8 are essential: start, end, intermediate initiator and catcher, attached interrupting (this is actually BPMN 1.x subset).

If only essential plus useful types (6 totally) and essential positions (5 totally) are taken then there would be 30 combinations potentially possible from which only 19 are valid:

For the sake of comparison, the total number of valid event combinations in BPMN 2.0 is 63.

Leave a Comment

Get the BPI Web Feed

Using the HTML code below, you can display this Business Process Incubator page content with the current filter and sorting inside your web site for FREE.

Copy/Paste this code in your website html code:

<iframe src="https://www.businessprocessincubator.com/content/more-on-essential-and-redundant-bpmn-events/?feed=html" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" width="100%" height="700">

Customizing your BPI Web Feed

You can click on the Get the BPI Web Feed link on any of our page to create the best possible feed for your site. Here are a few tips to customize your BPI Web Feed.

Customizing the Content Filter
On any page, you can add filter criteria using the MORE FILTERS interface:

Customizing the Content Filter

Customizing the Content Sorting
Clicking on the sorting options will also change the way your BPI Web Feed will be ordered on your site:

Get the BPI Web Feed

Some integration examples

BPMN.org

XPDL.org

×