Adding Documentation to a Process

ActiveBPEL™ Designer User’s Guide

Adding Documentation to a Process

ActiveBPEL offers two ways to add annotations to a process: Comments and Documentation. You can add a <documentation> element to a BPEL process, activities, and links. For design-time, comments are useful because you can add tasks and to-do’s to them. For details, see Adding Comments to a Process.

You can add documentation to any element of the process, such as an activity, link, variable, or the process itself.

Select an item from the Outline view or the Process Editor canvas. For example:

Select Process or a partner link, variable, or copy operation from the Outline view
Select an activity or link on the Process Editor canvas

In the Properties view, at the end of the Documentation row, click the Dialog Button.
Select New to open the Documentation Details dialog, as the example shows.

Documentation details dialog

Fill in the dialog as follows:

Documentation. Enter the content in your chosen format, such as plain text, HTML, or XHTML.
Language (optional). Type in the language identifier of the natural or formal language that the content is written in. Refer to the XML 1.0 specification for language identifier reference details.
Source (optional). This attribute indicates the source of application information, in the form of a URI. (The attribute is described in the XSD schema and is generally included with the documentation element.)

Click OK, and select New to add additional documentation elements.
In the Documentation entries list, you can reorganize entries by selecting the Up or Down buttons. The first entry in the list is displayed in the Properties view of the activity, link, or partner link.

Documentation appears as formatted tags in the Source view of your process.