About Processes

A process is a single workflow within the configuration. A process begins with a single input task, contains one or more tasks and/or branches, and terminates with one or more output tasks. In its simplest form, a process can simply retrieve data from a given folder and save it in a different folder. In most cases, though, processes are more elaborate and configurations, which may include many processes, can be extremely complex.

The available processes in your PlanetPress Workflow Configuration are listed in the The Configuration Components Pane. Processes in a configuration will always run concurrently. You can schedule processes to run only at certain times or intervals (see Access Process Properties).

There are three types of processes available to you:

A Normal process will run as soon as an input file is available through its input task or, if it is scheduled not to run at that time, will start processing as soon as the schedule permits it.
Startup processes are processes that run only once before every other process in a given configuration. They can be used to perform operations that need to be completed once before the configuration can actually be run, such as to map network drives. You may only have one single startup process in your configuration.
Subprocesses are processes which can be called by any other process from any action task. They can be used to perform and reuse redundant operations that may need to be executed numerous times. For more information on subprocesses, see About Subprocesses.

Regular and startup processes can be set to be Active (process runs normally) or Inactive (process will not run at all). An inactive process will display in the Configuration components as red and strike-through. Inactive processes can be useful for designing new processes in a live configuration, since the process does not execute there is no danger is submitting it to aPlanetPress Workflow Service.