Windchill provides for background processing through the use of background method queues stored in the database. The queues are tables of method invocation specifications that are executed by a background processing manager. The specifications are essentially method names and serialized arguments (stored as BLOBs) that are stored in the database for reliability.

A transaction that triggers background processing includes updating a background method queue as part of the overall transaction. Once committed, the background manager is notified, and it proceeds to execute the methods asynchronously. Removal of queue entries is performed within the transaction that carries out the method, thus guaranteeing that entries are processed to completion only once, while still ensuring that incomplete transactions are restarted after system failures. Upon failure, entries are marked as requiring administrator intervention and ignored.

Examples of the background processing mechanism include life cycle processing, workflow automation, and full text retrieval (FTR) index maintenance.

For more information about queue configuration and maintenance, see About Background Queues.