Workflow events are also maintained as part of Workflow Administration. These events are sent by application functions and are used to transition activities in workflows which are waiting on those events or to enact workflow processes.
Manual, event wait, and decision activities will use events to progress a workflow process instance. The application raises an event when the action associated with the specified activity (task) is complete or when a particular event defined for an event wait activity has been completed. These events signal the Workflow Engine to complete the associated activity instance that is waiting on that event and to progress the workflow process instance by evaluating the next set of transitions and executing the next activity in the workflow.
The application may also use events to enact a workflow. When an action associated with an enactment event occurs in the application, the Workflow Engine processes this event and enacts a new instance of the specified workflow process defined in the process enactment event configuration data.
The process enactment event configuration data is created, maintained and manipulated using the workflow administration functionality. This configuration data specifies the process/processes to enact in response to a specific event being raised. Such process enactments may be enabled, disabled, changed and even removed at runtime using these administration functions. Mappings of event data to the enactment data required by the process may also be configured in this administration area of the application. For more details on enactment by raising events see Enactment by Raising Events.