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Arbitrary Looping

Arbitrary Looping is a very standard functionality in any workflow management which provides the ability to direct the flow of activities in both forward and
backward direction within a process definition. The process can be routed back to any of the completed activities.

The Following Diagram shows how the Arbitrary Loop will execute the given activities.

Note: 
If the workflow is routed backwards, some of the previous activities will be triggered once
again  and the transition rules, if any, would be applied again. Since same transactions are
revisited, the workflow path could vary depending upon the current value and some of the
records may become redundant.

The arbitrary looping will execute the activities in sequence as defined in the process definition until it reaches the ROUTE.TO construct. The process will
now be redirected to the activity defined in the field ROUTE.TO.ACT.  After the execution of the activity, the process will now jump to the next activity where
the loop had started.  For example, in the above diagram, Activity 1, Activity2 and Activity 3 will execute in sequence, the process is routed back to Activity
1. On completion, the process will not execute Activity 2 and Activity 3, it will directly jump to Activity 4 if any, otherwise the process will complete.

The following screenshot shows a sample definition of the PW.PROCESS.DEFINITION for arbitrary looping. The field PATTERN.CONSTR needs to be defined
as ROUTE.TO (indicating this construct will route the flow to an already executed activity)
In the above screen shot three activities(CREATE.CUSTOMER,CREATE.ACCOUNT and CREATE.SECTOR)  and one looping activity (Activity with
UNIQUE NAME as LOOP) has been defined.  The activity CREATE.CUSTOMER will be executed first when the process is initiated. On completion of the first
activity, CREATE.ACCOUNT activity will trigger automatically because the FOLLOW.ON.ACT for CREATE.CUSTOMER is set to YES. 

Once the CREATE.ACCOUNT activity is completed, the process will  hit  the ROUTE.TO construct and the activity defined in the ROUTE.TO.ACT will be
triggered. The activity CREATE.CUSTOMER will  be triggered again. The next activity to be executed would be  CREATE.SECTOR because the field
PRE.REQ.CONSTR has the value ROUTE.TO_LOOP (combination of pattern construct and unique name)

The enquiry PROCESS.STATUS can be launched to view the status of each activity within a process. This enquiry will display the current status of each
activity and provide option to execute any activity in the list. The following screen shot shows the output of PROCESS.STATUS enquiry which  lists  the
activities that are completed and pending in a process.
(c) Temenos Systems 2015
 

Published on: 25.05.2017