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Understanding Process Version Life Cycles

Process versioning allows different versions a process to exist in Process Server. Process versioning allows you to control when processes become effective and for how long. You can also control what happens to processes created by older versions when a new version becomes effective. While multiple versions of a process can exist concurrently, only the latest effective version can create new process instances.

The latest effective version is in an online state. Other states are:

Online pending
: describes versions that have an effective date in the future.

Offline pending
: describes versions whose expiration date has arrived, but running process instances are still active.

Offline
: describes expired versions that no longer have running process instances.

The process deployment descriptor (PDD) can contain a version element whose attributes describe how a deployment is versioned. These selections are all optional and have default values as described below.

The following example shows the syntax for version information in the

.pdd

file.

<version effectiveDate="2005-12-12T00:00:00-05:00"
         expirationDate="2007-12-12T00:00:00-05:00" 
         id="1.5"   
         runningProcessDisposition="migrate"/>

where:

effectiveDate

is the date the new version becomes the current version and all new process instances run against it.

Depending on the disposition selected for running processes, some may continue to run until they finish using the older version. The effective date is an XML schema date/time value. The time expression includes a time zone, indicated as the midnight hour plus or minus the number of hours ahead of or behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for the computer’s time zone. In the example above, the computer time zone is Eastern Standard Time, which is five hours behind UTC. If you do not provide an effective date, it defaults to the date and time the process is deployed to the server.

expirationDate

is the date, beyond the online date, the current version expires.

An offline version is not capable of creating new process instances. Once all of the running processes tied to an offline pending version complete, the version becomes offline. All process instances for the current version run to completion. The expiration date is an XML schema date/time value. (Same as effective date). If you do not provide an expiration date, the version does not expire until you manually set it to offline in the

Application Integration Console

or until a newer version is deployed.

is the process version number in

major.minor

format.

You do not need to provide a version number as Process Server auto-increments new versions. The server increments a version number by dropping the minor value and adding 1 to the max number. For example, version 1.5 increments to version 2.0.

runningProcessDisposition

is the action Process Server takes on any other versions of the same process that currently have processes executing after this version’s effective date arrives.

Values for

runningProcessDisposition

are:

Maintain

. All process instances for the previous versions should run to completion. This is the default value.

Migrate

. All running process instances created by previous versions will have their state information migrated to use the newly deployed process definition once its effective date arrives. If there are incompatible changes between the versions, descriptive warning messages are written to the

Application Integration Console

Server Log. Refer to the

Migrating Running Processes when Warnings are Generated

for details.

Terminate

. Indicates that all process instances running under previous versions should terminate on the effective date of the new version, regardless of if the process instances are complete.

Deployed Process Version Detail Page