What the user sees as an individual process is implemented by one or more process workers, or workers for short, each of which supports the parts of the process run by a single participant.
For example, if you have a process to ask someone to perform some work, there will be two workers. Your will have a worker that sends a request and which receives the response back. The other person will have a worker that receives the request and which sends the response back.
Some processes may have only one worker because they only involve one participant, and some may have more than two workers because they have multiple participants.
Each worker is independent of the other workers in the process. It has its own process definition and its own data to control process execution, record events, and to store business data and files. It communicates with the other workers in the process using connections.
Each worker in a process has a role. The worker that starts the process always has a role of "owner". The owner starts the process by sending each other partner a definition of their part of the process, which the other partner uses to create a worker.
In a process to request some work from a partner, the order of operations would be:
-
Create the owner worker.
-
The owner worker sends the partner a request to create a corresponding worker. This request includes the process for the worker to follow.
-
The partner creates a worker.
-
The owner sends a request to the partner's worker to perform some work.
-
The partner performs the work and returns a response.
-
The owner receives the response.
To keep track of what's going on, workers in the same process have the same process identifier.
The remainder of this section describes the anatomy of a worker in more detail.
Viewing worker details
You can view the detail of individual workers by navigating to them through the group in settings. Go to Settings, then pick the Groups option. Select the group that contains the worker, and you will see a list of workers associated with that group.
You can view worker details by right clicking on the name of the worker (Improve the poem in this example) and opening it in a new window.
