Oracle Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is an interesting addition to Oracle BPM Suite which has been
introduced in 11.1.1.7. Adaptive Case Management is suitable to model complex work-flows in which there is no set order of activities taking place. This allows more control to the end user on what to do when.
When a case is started, it is a running process in the SOA infrastructure. The main component is Oracle Business Rules which governs (among other things) the availability of activities and when certain process milestones are achieved. The case API allows you to query the case events and milestones (how you can expose the API as a service is described
here and
here by Roger Goossens).
Sometimes people want to obtain information about cases such as;
- in how many cases has a certain activity been executed?
- in which cases has a certain milestone been reached?
Cases can crash, be restarted, migrated, aborted, purged, etc. Sometimes you might not want to depend on the running case being there to provide the information you want. Also using the API every time you want certain information might put a serious strain on your system. Using sensors or BAM might help but they require an investment to implement and are still manual implementations with no guarantee you can obtain information in the future you did not think you would need in the present/past.