It is possible to delete a task with an Active status (that is, the task is currently running with a status of Active and is visible on the Task List Management page). You can delete a task directly from the Task List Management page or by deleting the task type which defines the task. For information about how to delete a task from the Task List Management page, see Deleting a Task. For information about how to delete a task type, see Deleting a Task Type from My webMethods Server).

In those situations where the task was started by a task step in a running process, the process will be currently waiting for a response from the task to indicate that the task has completed. If the task is deleted, the response will never be sent; when you delete an Active task that was started by a running process, no indication of this deletion is provided to the Process Engine where the parent process is running.

Therefore, the process will continue to wait indefinitely for a response from the deleted task step. If you have configured a timeout value, it will eventually time out.

Deleting a Completed, Cancelled, or Expired task will not affect the running process because the task's status was previously delivered to the process; however, it will affect monitoring, in that the task will no longer appear in the monitoring results.

Best practices call for designing processes with adequate transition logic to handle non-responsive tasks (such as a deleted Active task). When a task is Completed, Cancelled, or Expired, the task business data is delivered to the process and the process will continue its execution. The status field value is an implicit output of every task step. Therefore, it is possible to implement transition logic based on a status value of Completed, Cancelled, or Expired.