Pattern 23 (Workflow to Environment - Push)

FLASH animation of Data Interaction - Workflow to Environment - Push-Oriented pattern

Description

The ability of a process environment to pass data elements to resources or services in the operational environment.

Example

At any time the Process Tax Return process may save its working data to an external data warehouse facility.

Motivation

Where a process specification has global data elements, it is desirable if facilities are available for communicating this information to external applications. This is particularly useful as a means of enabling external applications to be kept informed of aggregate process relevant data (e.g. percentage of successful cases, resource usage etc.) without needing to continually poll the process.

Overview

There are various approaches to passing global data to and from the external environment are illustrated in Figure 16.

Figure 16: Data interaction between a process environment and the operating system

Context

There are no specific context conditions associated with this pattern.

Implementation

Whilst this pattern serves as a useful mechanism for proactively communicating data elements and runtime information to an external application, it is not widely implemented. WebSphere MQ provides a limited ability to communicate the creation of and changes to run-time data elements (e.g. task data in work items) to an external application via its push data access model.

Issues

None observed.

Solutions

N/A

Evaluation Criteria

An offering achieves full support if it has a construct that satisfies the description for the pattern. It achieves a partial support rating if programmatic extensions are required to facilitate the data passing.

Product Evaluation

To achieve a + rating (direct support) or a +/- rating (partial support) the product should satisfy the corresponding evaluation criterion of the pattern. Otherwise a - rating (no support) is assigned.

Summary of Evaluation