The Inclusive Gateway can be seen as a combination of an exclusive and a parallel gateway. Like an exclusive gateway, you can define conditions on outgoing sequence flows and the inclusive gateway will evaluate them. However, the main difference is that the inclusive gateway can receive more than one sequence flow, like a parallel gateway.

The functionality of the inclusive gateway is based on the incoming and outgoing sequence flows:

• fork: all outgoing sequence flow conditions are evaluated and for the sequence flow conditions that evaluate to ‘true’, the flows are followed in parallel, creating one concurrent execution for each sequence flow.
• join: all concurrent executions arriving at the inclusive gateway wait at the gateway until an execution has arrived for each of the incoming sequence flows that have a process token. This is an important difference to the parallel gateway. So in other words, the inclusive gateway will only wait for the incoming sequence flows that are executed. After the join, the process continues past the joining inclusive gateway.

Note that an inclusive gateway can have both fork and join behavior, if there are multiple incoming and outgoing sequence flows for the same inclusive gateway. In that case, the gateway will first join all incoming sequence flows that have a process token, before splitting into multiple concurrent paths of executions for the outgoing sequence flows that have a condition that evaluates to ‘true’.

Defining an inclusive gateway needs one line of XML:

<inclusiveGateway id="myInclusiveGateway" />

The actual behavior (fork, join or both) is defined by the sequence flows connected to the inclusive gateway. For example, the model above comes down to the following XML:

<startEvent id="theStart" />
<sequenceFlow id="flow1" sourceRef="theStart" targetRef="fork" />

<inclusiveGateway id="fork" />
<sequenceFlow sourceRef="fork" targetRef="receivePayment" >
<conditionExpression xsi:type="tFormalExpression">${paymentReceived == false}</conditionExpression>
</sequenceFlow>
<sequenceFlow sourceRef="fork" targetRef="shipOrder" >
<conditionExpression xsi:type="tFormalExpression">${shipOrder == true}</conditionExpression>
</sequenceFlow>

<userTask id="receivePayment" name="Receive Payment" />
<sequenceFlow sourceRef="receivePayment" targetRef="join" />

<userTask id="shipOrder" name="Ship Order" />
<sequenceFlow sourceRef="shipOrder" targetRef="join" />

<inclusiveGateway id="join" />
<sequenceFlow sourceRef="join" targetRef="archiveOrder" />

<userTask id="archiveOrder" name="Archive Order" />
<sequenceFlow sourceRef="archiveOrder" targetRef="theEnd" />

<endEvent id="theEnd" />

In the above example, after the process is started, two tasks are created if the process variables paymentReceived == false and shipOrder == true. In case only one of these conditions evaluates to true, only one task will be created. If no condition evaluates to true, an exception is thrown. This can be prevented by specifying a default outgoing sequence flow. In the following example one task will be created, the ship order task:

HashMap<String, Object> variableMap = new HashMap<String, Object>();
variableMap.put("receivedPayment", true);
variableMap.put("shipOrder", true);

ProcessInstance pi = runtimeService.startProcessInstanceByKey("forkJoin");

TaskQuery query = taskService.createTaskQuery()
                         .processInstanceId(pi.getId())
                         .orderByTaskName()
                         .asc();

List<Task> tasks = query.list();
assertEquals(1, tasks.size());

Task task = tasks.get(0);
assertEquals("Ship Order", task.getName());

When this task is completed, the second inclusive gateway joins the two executions and, since there is only one outgoing sequence flow, no concurrent paths of execution are created and only the Archive Order task is active.

Note that an inclusive gateway does not need to be ‘balanced’ (i.e., a matching number of incoming/outgoing sequence flows for corresponding inclusive gateways). An inclusive gateway will simply wait for all incoming sequence flows and create a concurrent path of execution for each outgoing sequence flow, not influenced by other constructs in the process model.

Camunda Extensions

Additional Resources

• Inclusive Gateways in the BPMN 2.0 Modeling Reference
• Conditional and Default Sequence Flows