Activities performed within the context of a business process may require data as their input or deliver data as output. This way activities manipulate workflow relevant data and transfer these data among themselves. The properties of these workflow data have to be defined in the model. For more details on workflow data refer to Workflow Data.
This chapter explains how to work with workflow data in the Eclipse Modeler. For details on working with concrete data, please refer to Data Integration.
Figure: Representations of Data in the Outline View and Diagram of the
Process Workbench
To create a data you can either:
Figure: Creating a Data Element from the toolbar
You can use one of the predefined data, which is displayed in the Outline view. Simply add it to the diagram via drag and drop.

Figure: Predefined Data
Data elements have the following general properties:

Figure: Properties - General
Click the data type on the left pane of the properties dialog. There you can edit the data type specific properties. For a detailed discussion of the configuration of the Stardust data types, see section Data Integration.

Figure: Data Properties Dialog
In this section you can specify simulation configurations, as described detailed in the chapter Simulation Configurations of the Stardust Simulation Guide.
In this section you can set the following Process Effort properties:
Figure: Effort Planning Properties of an Data Element
Please refer to chapter Project Effort Calculation for detailed information on this functionality.
You can mark process data of type primitive, serializable, structured data and XML as volatile. Process data values of volatile process data are removed from the Audit Trail on process completion. In case of straight through processing (process execution in one transaction) volatile process data values are not stored at all in the database.
The data type section of each data properties dialog provides a check box to indicate if a data is volatile or not.
Figure: Marking Process Data as volatile
Note
It is not recommended to mark data that is used as descriptor as volatile!
To delete a data, use the option Delete in the data's pop-up menu in a diagram or in the Outline view tree area.
To remove a data symbol from the diagram, choose the option Delete Symbol in the data's pop-up menu. After this operation the data and the data mappings between activities and the data will still be part of the model.
In case a provider-consumer relationship is established between two models, the data of the provider model can be referenced in the consumer model. To reference the data, perform the following steps:
Figure: Data Available for Reference
When you drag-and-drop the referenced data the reference is created and the referenced model data appears in the locally defined model data.
Figure: Data Available for Reference
For more information, please refer to section Referencing Model Elements of chapter External Model Resources.
Note that if a data with an identical ID already exists in the consumer or referencing model you cannot refer the data of the provider or referenced model. Similarly, you cannot create a data in the consumer model, if the data with identical ID is in use as a reference from a provider model. In such a case, a model validation error is displayed.
For more information, please refer to section Consistency Checks of chapter Deploying a Workflow Model.