Converging and diverging process

flows with gateways

Gateways control the divergence and convergence of a sequence flow,
determining branching and merging of the paths that a process can take at run
time.
About this task
You can think of inclusive and exclusive gateways as questions that are asked at a
particular point in the flow. The question has a defined set of alternative answers,
which act as gates. The process cannot proceed until a valid answer is provided.
You can model questions by using JavaScript conditions, which are evaluated
before the flow is allowed to proceed.
You can model the following types of gateways in your process or service flow
diagram:

Table 1. Types of gateways that can be modeled in process diagrams

Component icon Gateway Description

type

Parallel Use a parallel, diverging gateway when

(AND) you want the process to follow all
available paths.
Use a parallel, converging gateway when
you want to converge all available paths.

Inclusive Use inclusive, diverging gateway when

(OR) you want to follow one or more available
paths based on conditions that you
specify.
Use downstream of an inclusive diverging
gateway to converge multiple paths into a
single path after all the active paths
completed their runtime execution. The
inclusive join looks upstream at each path
to determine whether the path is active, in
which case it waits. Otherwise, it passes
the token through without waiting.
 Table 1. Types of gateways that can be modeled in process diagrams

Component icon Gateway Description

type

Exclusive Use to model a point in the process or

(XOR) service flow execution where only one of
several paths can be followed, depending
on a condition, or to model a point in
process execution when the token for one
of several incoming paths is passed
through the gateway.
Note
The exclusive gateways are the only
gateways that can be implemented in
human services. For more information,
see Implementing exclusive gateways.

Event Use to model a point in the process

execution where only one of several paths
can be followed, depending on events that
occur. A specific event, such as the
receipt of a message or timer event,
determines the path to be taken. An event
gateway must be modeled a certain way
as described in Modeling event gateways.

When you model inclusive and exclusive gateways, if all conditions evaluate
to false, the process follows the default sequence flow. The default sequence flow
is the first sequence flow that you create from the gateway to a following activity,
but you can change the default sequence flow at any time, as described in the
following procedure.