8.4

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" on page 496. Processes in a configuration will always run
concurrently. You can schedule processes to run only at certain times or intervals (see "
Process Properties" on page 523).
There are three types of processes available to you:
l 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.
l 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.
l 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.
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 a
PlanetPress Workflow Service.
Subprocesses
Subprocesses are special processes that can be called by any other process. These act
exactly as subroutines in programming languages, allowing users to reuse existing processes
by sharing them to the whole configuration file. They can thus be used to perform redundant
operations that may need to be executed numerous times; for instance, archiving a copy of a
zipped file received as the input job file, then decompressing it before sending the unzipped
version of it back to the calling process .
Whenever a process calls a subprocess, the main process (the caller) will wait for the called
subprocess to finish its execution before carrying on with its own. This means the subprocess
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