Runtime Behavior of Time Constraints

If you have modeled a non-critical completion deadline with a boundary event and the task has not been completed before the deadline is reached, the task will be escalated. A red exclamation mark appears next to the entry in Universal Worklist (UWL). As there is a non-critical boundary event to handle the escalation, the process flow continues from the boundary event, including the specific output mapping of the boundary event. When the task is completed, another token of the process continues independently following the regular flow out of the human activity, that is two different branches get executed in your process model.

If you have modeled a non-critical completion deadline and the task has not been completed before the deadline is reached, the task will be escalated. A red exclamation mark appears next to the entry in UWL. As there is no boundary event to handle the escalation, nothing else happens. The normal process flow will continue as soon as the task has been completed

If you have modeled a critical completion deadline with a boundary event and the task has not been completed before the deadline is reached, the task will be canceled and will no longer be visible in UWL. As there is a critical boundary event to handle the exception, the process continues from the critical boundary event, including the specific output mapping of the boundary event and does not follow the regular flow out of the human activity.

If you have modeled a critical completion deadline and the task has not been completed before the deadline is reached, the task will be canceled and will no longer be visible in UWL. As there is no boundary event to handle the exception, it propagates to the next level, for example if it occurred in a sub-process. If there is no handling boundary event and the exception reaches the root process, the complete process will be suspended.

An expiration at a task defines that the task is not valid any longer and will be canceled. As a result, the normal process flow continues and output mapping is performed. As there is no intermediate state for tasks in SAP NetWeaver BPM, the result will most likely be empty. Thus, as soon as a task expires the (empty) output mapping takes place and might overwrite existing data. In case you use expiration in combination with the deadlines (and boundary events) mentioned above, the described behavior will be the same including the things that happen when the task expires.