What are Participants?
Participants are the people and services that the process interacts with over the course of its execution. Communication to or from a participant is always through a Web service interface.
Participants simplify the BPEL details you need to provide for an interface. By creating participants, you can skip over some technical details in BPEL as Process Developer generates details for you.
Here are the participant types:
- •Process service consumers
Each process interacts with at least one participant: the participant that sends the service request message that starts the process. This participant is the first process service consumer. You can also create additional consumers if there are additional participants that use services provided by a process. Consumers can also provide callback service. These allow a process to request that the consumer perform operations. In BPEL, the process service consumer is equivalent to a partner link whose myRole property has been set.
- •Partner service providers
If the process needs to invoke a service to do some work for the process, it calls a service that is provided by a partner service provider. The process can also make callback services available to a partner service provider. The interface for such a callback is listed with the partner service provider that can use it. In BPEL, this participant is the equivalent to a partner link whose partnerRole property has been set.
- •Human task participants (on-premises only)
If the process needs people to accomplish some of its steps, it uses people activities. A human task participant represents the role of the person who will complete some of the activities of the process. Each human task participant lists the tasks that its role works on. In BPEL4People, a Logical People Group is created for each human task participant.
For details on using the Participants view in conjunction with HTML form development, see
Adding a New Service Operation for a Form or a Task.