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Reducing the Number of PCS Email Notifications to Process Initiators

Aug 17, 2017 | Blogs

Much like the number of telemarketing phone calls we all receive daily on our phones, Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS) sends out a lot of email notifications to the initiators of process instances.

 

This is because the default behavior of the PCS is to send an email notification to the initiator of a process instance every time a human activity in the process completes. Although these emails can be customized using the new email template feature, end users still find these notification emails filling up their inboxes both confusing and unnecessary.

Human Activity completion email notification to the initiator of a process instance

 

Although there is currently no out of the box option in PCS to prevent these emails from being sent to process instance initiators, there is a fairly simple workaround to this issue.  First select the Start event of the process, and open its Data Association.

 

Open the process start event's data association

 

Because it is often necessary to know who initiated an instance downstream in the process, first create a data association to save the creator predefined variable’s value coming out of the Start event to a process variable (1 below). Next, set the creator predefined variable to an empty string (2).

 

Set output of the start event's data association

 

As shown above, an empty string in a PCS process activity’s data association is set using two double quotes next to one another (e.g., “”).

 

Once the Apply button is clicked in the data association dialog, and the PCS application is saved, published and redeployed, process instance initiators will no longer receive email notifications every time human activities complete downstream in the process.