Maintenance of Forks
Use
You use a
fork in a workflow definition when the business process can be continued by several users at the same time. You can also configure the fork in such a manner that not all branches have to be processed.In the workflow definition, the start of a fork is shown with the symbol 
and the end with 
.
Integration
In addition to this explicitly-modeled parallelism, there is also table-driven, dynamic parallel processing and the work queue. For more information, see
Implementation Options for Parallel Processing.Features
You can create any number of branches in a fork. All branches of the fork flow into a join operator (). When one branch of a fork reaches this join operator at runtime, the end conditions are checked.
The system checks whether the number of branches processed agrees with the number of branches required as specified in the definition. The system then checks whether a condition produces the result true.
If one of the end conditions is fulfilled, any existing work items of the fork are set to status logically deleted, and the workflow is continued after the join operator.
The individual branches of a fork should be functionally independent.
Activities
To define a fork, you specify the number of parallel branches required with the step name. The fork, consisting of the start operator, the branches each with an undefined step and the join operator, is inserted into the workflow definition.
To define the termination of the fork, you enter the number of branches required and the condition. For more information about conditions, see the
Condition Editor.If you make no entry for the number of branches required, the system takes the number of branches.
You can transfer an existing modeled block into a fork as a new branch as follows:
Select and choose Paste block in the context menu.