Assign activity

Chapter 8 Building an Executable BPM: Managing Data and Choreography

Assign activity

An Assign activity is a sequence of atomic assign tasks. An assign task is an XPath expression that copies value from a variable to another variable.

The type of the assign task depends on the source of the task whereas the target of the assign task is always a context variable or an XPath expression.

When you select the Assign implementation type, the Action type field is automatically set to Assign and grayed and an Assignments tab is displayed. In addition, the process becomes atomic.

The Assignments tab lets you create the data transformations needed for the Assign activity, as they allow the copy of data from one variable to another:

For more information about data transformations, see the Data Transformations (Executable BPM) section.

In WS-BPEL 2.0 and Sybase WorkSpace Business Process languages, the Assignments tab is also available for Receive, Reply and Invoke activities when the "Support Implicit Assignment" setting is set to true in the process languages supporting these types of operations.