Token splitting?

[dhartford]

Hey all,
Not even sure if the subject is the right idea, but the business use-cases are as follows:

*A multipage fax comes in as an individual fax token. A user looks at the fax and may want to split it into several new faxes before continuing the rest of the process. Each of the new faxes should become their own tokens to follow the process (and, if possible, relate to the orginal token).

*An order comes in with 2 items. It so happens that the order 'token' has these two items that need to be processed differently (one item was a piece of software, another might be the AMP/Maintanence agreement on that software). The individual items need to follow their own processes independently of each other but need to be aware of their parent order token to later be joined together to complete the order.

Is this something jBPM/jPDL can handle?

thanks,
-D

[kukeltje]

If case one is like http://is.tm.tue.nl/research/patterns/download/swf/pat_14.swf, it is possible. Look at the testcase to see an example of pattern 14
case 2 is possible but would take some work of yourself. e.g. some businessrules (drools ;-0)) to define the decsisions and a custom fork

[dhartford]

Hi kukeltje,
Thanks for your answers! Case 2 I could see require custom programming -- always good to get confirmation.

As for Case 1, my concern is the original idea is the 'base' token would exit the process and the newly split tokens would continue forward (at least that's the verbal description). Process-wise, would this be a case where the split tokens would need to be created back at the beginning of the process as new tokens while the base token ends the process (based on a rule where it was split)?

[kukeltje]

D,

Normally there is a parent token which is not splitted, but creates child tokens. The behaviour of this parent token can be varied. Wait for all child tokens to finish, go-on if one is finished etc... look at the different patterns and see which one fits most. Then look at the testcases for the corresponding 'implementation'

btw, it could be that I selected the wrong pattern