Process Engine supports specific simple and composite data types.
Process Engine supports literals and variables of the following simple data types:
TIP Process Engine implicitly converts integer values to float values under certain circumstances.
Normal, simple arithmetic operations are available for integer values.
TIP The above-listed length applies to internally-stored values of the string data type-the range does not apply to string literals entered in Personal Work Manager (FileNet Web Services), the Process page (Open Client), the Tasks pages (Workplace), or Process Designer or Process Administrator dialog boxes.
Many normal string operations, such as concatenation, substring, and substring search are available. 'C' style escape sequences are not available; instead, use the function hex.
TIP The boolean values true and false are case-sensitive; these values are valid in lowercase only.
In most cases, false evaluates to a lesser value than true; the only exception is in sort rule expressions, where true evaluates a lesser value than false.
Process Engine does not support implicit conversions to the boolean data type; only the values true and false are acceptable. You can, however, use the convert function for an explicit conversion (for example, to put a value of another data type into a boolean data field).
Note that for user-defined applications developed in environments which do not have true boolean values (such as 'C' and Visual Basic), all non-zero values evaluate to true and a value of zero evaluates to false.
Process Engine can store a float value that is equal to 0, or is in the following range:
approximately 2.2250738585072014e-308 |x|
approximately 1.7976931348623157e308.
Normal, simple arithmetic operations are available for float values.
NOTE How a float value displays to the end user depends on the application the user is looking at. The Process applications display float values based on the locale of the end user client machine.
TIP Process Engine implicitly converts float values to integer values under certain circumstances.
Data type | Minimum | Maximum |
---|---|---|
Time | August 16, 1906 21:26:41 | December 1, 9999 12:00:00 |
Time32 (deprecated) | August 16, 1906 21:26:41 | January 13, 2038, 12:53:20 |
You can define fields of either type Time or type Time32 (deprecated) in Process Configuration Console in defining exposed fields.
You can define fields of type Time in Process Designer. If there are exposed fields of type Time32 (deprecated), you can select those fields for use in the workflow. You cannot define fields of type Time32 (deprecated) in Process Designer.
Available operations include converting to and from strings, adding and subtracting quantities (such as months) and getting the current system time. In conversions between the string and time data types, string representations of time values are formatted according to a template called a date/time mask. Internally, however, Process Engine stores time values as integers. When comparing time values, Process Engine compares the internal integer values rather than any string representations of those time values.
NOTE How the current time displays to the end user depends on the application the user is looking at. The Process applications display time values based on the locale of the end user client machine.
Process Engine supports single-dimensional arrays for all of the supported simple data types. Array support is based on the application development environment.
An array is a list of one or more elements of a uniform type indexed by an integer (starting with 1). You must specify an initial value for at least one array element when declaring an array.
Arrays automatically adjust their size to contain all current elements; for example, if an array currently contains three elements and you assign a value to the seventh element, the array resizes to include elements 4, 5, and 6 as well. Elements that are added to an array during automatic resizing are assigned the appropriate value, based on the following table.
The values are:
Data type |
Value |
---|---|
integer |
0 |
string |
<blank> or"" |
boolean |
true |
float |
0.0 |
time |
<today's date and time> (for example, 4/28/00 9:18 AM) |
Index values start at 1; you can put approximately 256,000 elements into an array. Available operations include indexing and taking the current size of an array. Note that the above-listed maximum size applies to internally stored arrays—it might not apply to arrays being passed to and from Process Engine via API calls.