General Properties
All kinds of activities have the same General properties that include:
- DeadLines
- Description
- Documentation
- Finish Mode
- Icon
- Id
- Limit
- Name
- Performer
- Priority
- Start Mode
All of these General properties can be seen in the figure below:
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Figure: General properties of the activities
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DeadLines
You can add deadlines to your activities also using this property. Just click the small button adjacent to DeadLines property. After you click the button, a DeadLines Dialog will appear before you as shown below:
Using DeadLines Dialog, you can easily add new deadlines or manage exisiting ones. To add a deadline, click New button and a New DeadLine Dialog will be opened. First select an Execution mode (same as discussed in Subflow) then you can add some expressions as a Condition. These expressions can only be written using VBScript because currently VBScript is supported only but in future, more scripting languages would also be supported. Finally you can write the name of the exception that would be thrown on reaching the deadline. All of these attributes are configured as shown below in the figure:
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Figure: Creating a new DeadLine using New DeadLine Dialog
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After you press OK button, deadline would be added for the specific activity that can be see in DeadLines Dialog of the activity as shown below:
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Figure: Newly added deadline listed in the DeadLines Dialog
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Description
Using this property, you can add short description of your activity.
Documentation
Using this property, you can select a documentation file (can be an html or chm file) containing the details about the activities.
Finish Mode
Using this mode, you can specify the behavior of the system at the end of the activity. There are two finish modes supported by XPDL Designer as follows:
Icon
Using this property, you can select an icon to represent any specific activity.
Id
This property represents the Id of the activity that is used for its identification.
Limit
This property specifies the time limit for the processes. Whenever a process starts, counting of the time also begins at the same time so that if the time reaches the Limit set for the specified process then the user can be notified. We simply add a numeric value to represent the time limit. Time unit is used from the Duration Unit property of the workflow process.
Name
This property represents the Name of the activity.
Performer
Using this property, you can add performers for the activities. Performers are infact participants and we have already describes in our earlier topics about how to manage participant. For more details, please refer to: Managing Workflow Participants at Package Level .
Priority
This property is used to set the priorities of the activities, which is applied on activities when their execution is started. Usually, it's a numeric value. A higher value represents the higher priority for the activity.
Start Mode
Start Mode describes that how the execution of an activity should be started. Like finish mode, we also have two options for the start mode as follows: