Outlining Notification Activities for PO

A notification is a specific type of activity that you model as a separate step in your business process. When the process flow reaches this step, an email is sent to notify selected recipients that a specific event has happened or some activity has been completed in previous process steps. Emails can be dynamic, keeping process data and results current. You can use notification activities in many places in the process model depending on which activities and events you want the process to send notifications about.

When you model notifications, you have to define the recipients of the email. Recipients can be users, groups, or roles from the User Management Engine (UME). An e-mail can be sent to users in the UME or to external recipients. You can also define recipients with an expression. Emails are sent in plain text. You can customize the subject and the text of the e-mail using text variables from the data objects in the process context.

You can specify the UME principals by using either the Principal or Expression attribute. By using the Principal attribute, you can select a user, role, and group. By using the Expression attribute, you can dynamically evaluate the recipients based on a context elements, rules, and functions.

The figure shows a screenshot of the configuration screen, in which the required entries for eMail recipients take place.

The expression is a combination of values, variables and functions that are evaluated at runtime to produce a new value. You can create expressions in an expression editor using a subset of the XML Path Language (XPath) grammar.

The expression editor contains a context and functions needed. The context contains all the data, relevant for the expression scope. You can use the functions to process the data from the context.