One of the most important mechanisms in process automation is the use of process instance variables, also called attributes. This mechanism makes automation flexible and able to connect to other devices by web services or handle form data.
Process instance variables consist out of a unique name and a value.
Variable Name
A variable name is a single word which starts with an alphanumeric Latin character (A-Z or a-z). It may contain the Latin letters A-Z or a-z and the digits 0-9. Other characters are not allowed.
Valid variable names are
Invalid variable names are
Variable Value
The value of a variable may contain the following types of values:
Other types may work but must be serializable to store them in the global scope. The Objects in the List and Dictionary type may be out of these types too.
The global scope specifies all process instance variables, which may be accessed by an operation. Each operation must specify, if and how variables out of the global scope are used or not. The following modes are available:
The scope of each operation for the required variables may be edited in the Advanced Properties Window
There are also a number of predefined variables which are described here
Best Practice
Those variables are generated in expressions of tasks they are used in. Especially operations with high mounds of data are supposed to be used with local scope. Common examples are content of data grids and displayed values of drop down lists with workflow attributes as source. Furthermore results of database queries are supposed to be handled this way via schema diagram and query editor.