Dynamic Process, Conditions and Scope

In Oracle Integration Cloud's Dynamic Processes activation/termination conditions can be based on case events. These events are related to the scope of the components they relate to, which implies some restrictions. The below explains how this works, and how to work around these restrictions.

A Dynamic Process or Case (as I will call it in this article) in the Oracle Integration Cloud consists of four component types: the Case itself, Stages (phases), Activities, and Milestones. An Activity or Milestone is either in a particular Stage (in the picture below Activities A to H are), or global (Activities X and Y). Cases, Processes, Stages, Activities and Miletones cannot be nested (but a Case can initiate a sub-Case via an Activity, which I will discuss another time).

Except for the case itself, all other components can explicitly be activated/enabled or terminated/completed based on conditions. For example in the dynamic process above Milestone 1 is activated once Activity A is completed, and Stage 2 is to be activated once Stage 1 is completed.

A Stage implicitly completes when all work in that stage is done (i.e. all Activities), and a Case implicitly completes when all work in the case is done. Currently the status of a Case cannot be explicitly set using conditions, but I would expect this to become possible in some next version. In the meantime there is a REST API that can be used to close or complete a case.

There are two types of conditions for explicit activation/termination:

• (case) Events, for example completion of an activity
• (case) Data Driven, for example "status" field gets value "started"

Events and Data Driven can also be used in combination, for example Activity B is only activated when Activity A is completed (event) AND some "status" data field has value "approve" (data driven).

The scope of an Event is its container, meaning:

• A Stage can only be activated or terminated by a condition based on an Event concerning another Stage or a Global Activity.
• An Activity can only be activated or terminated by a condition based on an Event concerning another Activity or Milestone in the same Stage.
• A Milestone can only be completed by a condition based on an Event concerning an Activity or another Milestone in the same Stage.
• A Global Activity can only be enabled or terminated by a condition based on an Event concerning a Stage, or Global Milestone or another Global Activity
• A Global Milestone can only be enabled or terminated by a condition based on an Event concerning a Stage, a Global Activity, or another Global Milestone

I expect that in practice most conditions will be based on Events (so far for me that is the case) where the scope of these events will impose no limit on that. However, there are situations where you will need a "work-around".

Let's assume that in the example Stage 2 is only to be activated when Milestone 1 is completed and otherwise Stage 2 is to be skipped and the case should directly go to Stage 3. Because of the way events are limited by their scope, you cannot create a condition for Stage 2 to be skipped based on the completion of Milestone 1 (which is in Stage 1 and therefore not visible outside).

The work-around is to use a Data Driven condition instead. You can for example have a "metaData.status" field that you can set to something like "skip phase 2" and use that instead.

In general, it probably always is a good idea to let your case have some complex data element for example called "metaData" consisting of fields like "dateStarted" and "status", which you fill out via the activities, and if needed can be used in conditions everywhere.