IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Developing business processes > Building business state machines > Create a business state machine

Designing a business state machine

If you are just beginning to design your business state machine, here are some suggestions on how to proceed.

A business state machine is an event driven business transaction in which external operations trigger changes that guide the transaction from one discrete mode, or state, to another. Here are the steps, in order, that we recommend you follow when building your business state machine.

Procedure

1. Determine your operations.
   

   These are the messages that travel between the business state machine and each of its partners.

   Some common examples are:

   • The message from the client that triggers the creation of the business state machine.

   • The messages sent by the business state machine to other partners (to delegate tasks) and the response from these partners.

   • Any message sent from the client to update the state of the process.

   • Any message sent from the client to cancel the process.

2. Define the states.
   

   In a basic business state machine, each incoming operation has a corresponding state.

   For example, in this diagram, each incoming operation (create, cancel, response) drives the business state machine into a new state (started, waiting, done).

   

3. Look for loops.
   

   A loop occurs when an operation returns the business state machine to a previous state as shown here:

   

4. Configure the transitions.
   

   The transition from one state to another may be qualified by one or more of the following attributes that you set on the transition itself:

   Timeout

   A timeout is either an expiration or a duration used to ensure that a state will not be maintained indefinitely while waiting for an operation that may never occur.

   Conditions

   A condition will only allow the transition to the next state if it evaluates to "True". Otherwise the current state is maintained.

   Actions

   An action is an activity of some kind that is invoked when this transition is fired. There are three types of actions:

   1. invokes
   2. Java snippets
   3. visual snippets

Create a business state machine