Undercover agents

An undercover agent (UCA) is attached to a message event or a content event in a process or business process definition (BPD) and calls a service to handle the event.

An undercover agent is started by an event. For example, when a message event is received from an external system, an undercover agent is needed to start the appropriate service in response to the message.

Message events can originate from any of the following components:

processes or BPDs (see Modeling message events)
web services that you create (see Publishing IBM Business Process Manager web services)
messages that you post to the JMS listener (see Posting a message to IBM Business Process Manager Event Manager)

When an undercover agent runs, it starts an IBM® Business Process Manager service, process, or BPD in response to the event.

When you use message event or a content event, you must attach an undercover agent to the event. For example, when a message event is received from an external system, an undercover agent is needed to trigger the message event in a process in response to the message.

If you want to run the startBpdWithName application programming interface (API) to start a process instance inside an undercover agent, set the <enable-start-bpd-from-uca> property to true in the 100Custom.xml file or another override file. Restart the product, and check the TeamworksConfiguration.running.xml file to ensure that the setting has the appropriate value. The property is set to false by default, and if you don't change it, you might have errors that prevent the process from starting.