Scenarios

Inside a collaboration, one or more scenarios contain the "code" that implements a business process. Each scenario specifies what happens in response to the arrival of particular types of business objects that represent particular types of events. Scenarios contain all of the processing work of a collaboration.

The relationship between collaborations and scenarios is similar to the relationship between traditional programs and routines. Routines enable a programmer to break up the logic of a program in any number of ways. For example, a program can contain one large routine that handles various input arguments or several routines, each of which handles a different input argument.

Similarly, a collaboration developer can use one scenario or multiple scenarios to perform the work of a collaboration. A collaboration that synchronizes employees, for example, could be designed in either of the following ways:

Figure 22 illustrates these two approaches.

Figure 22. Scenarios in Collaborations


Although scenarios execute independently of each other, you do not independently configure and manage each. You configure the collaboration, and all of the collaboration's scenarios inherit those settings.

Copyright IBM Corp. 1997, 2004