When you include a task representing human activity in a business process, the potential type and number of activities required to complete the task can be quite numerous. While it is possible to construct detailed logic within a task to anticipate all of these possible outcomes, that approach can be very labor intensive and error prone. In addition, if the business use case around the task changes, updating the logic can be difficult.

You can create and configure a parent task type in Designer, and associate it with one or more collaboration tasks. You can then configure task actions in the parent task so that when specific business data is received by the parent task, one or more collaboration tasks are created by the actions and assigned to specific My webMethods Server groups, roles, or users.

Then, when you include the parent task in a business process, the required collaboration tasks will be queued depending on the business data passed to the task in the process pipeline.

For example:

Suppose a satellite television company runs a business process for new orders, containing a task with the nominal activity of installing a dish and receiver. However, different equipment and installation teams are required depending on the service ordered by the customer. In addition, different parts of the country require different kinds of equipment for each type of service. The business data for the process can be configured to contain a field that defines the type of service and a postal code or other designator describing the service area.

Depending on the specified service type and location data contained in the pipeline for each individual order, the parent task in the process can queue an associated child task that is configured to determine its assignment value from a webMethods Business Rules decision table or business rule set defined in the child task.

The child task is delivered to a role or group representing the required installation team, and another (similarly configured) child task is queued and routed to a role or group representing the inventory team to prepare the correct type of equipment for the installers. The parent task can be configured to complete automatically when all of the collaboration tasks are completed.

For more information about configuring collaboration tasks, see Creating a Collaboration Task. For more information about working with webMethods Business Rules to create task assignments, see Configuring Assignees for a Task Assignment.