Building services

Use services to implement the activities in a business process definition (BPD). When a BPD starts and the tasks within it are invoked, services perform the required functions.

The type of service that you choose to create depends upon the requirements of the activity. For example, if an activity requires integration with an external system, such as a database, you can create an integration service. If an activity requires that call center personnel enter data about customer requests, you can create a human service with a coach.

Service types
Learn about the types of services available in IBM BPM and when to use each type.
Service components
Learn about the tools and components available when building services in IBM Process Designer.
Building a Decision service
Build a Decision service when you want a decision or condition in a business rule to determine which process implementation is invoked. For example, when a certain condition evaluates to true, Process Designer implements the associated activity or action.
Building a client-side human service
Build a client-side human service to handle the interaction for process or case instances between the system and users through interactive tasks, dashboards, or user interfaces. Within a client-side human service, you can use coaches, client-side scripts, and services to create a service flow that is run entirely in a web browser. Case management functions are only available if you have IBM BPM Advanced with the Basic Case Management feature installed.
Building a heritage human service
Build a heritage human service when you want an activity in your business process definition (BPD) to create an interactive task that process participants can perform in a web-based user interface.
Building an Ajax service
Build an Ajax service when you want a coach view to send data to or retrieve data from the server asynchronously, such as for auto-completion in text fields, for default selection values in selection lists, and so forth.
Building an integration service
Build an integration service when you want a flow to interact with an external system.
Building an advanced integration service
An advanced integration service is used to call a service implemented in IBM Integration Designer from a business process definition (BPD) (via a system task) or another service (via a nested service).
Building a General System service
Use General System services when you want to orchestrate other background services, manipulate variable data, generate HTML for a Coach, or perform some other actions that do not require any integrations or business rules.
Modeling secure Ajax services
To ensure that the Ajax services that you model are secure, you must add authorization checks to the service implementation.

Parent topic: Modeling processes