About the Relationship Between Parent Tasks and Collaboration Tasks

When you create a new task type in Designer, it is not configured as either a parent or collaboration task. You have two opportunities to define this task parent-child relationship between two or more task types:

In Designer. You can specify a parent task on the Overview tab of the task editor; this automatically designates the task you are working with as a collaboration task and makes collaboration-specific event actions available within both the collaboration and the parent tasks. A parent task can have one or more child collaboration tasks, but a collaboration task can have only one parent task. If you do not want to designate another task as the parent, you can specify the name of the task you are working with as the parent; this keeps the event actions limited to the current task.

Typically, both the parent and child task are contained in the same task application project, for ease of maintenance and so they can be published to the runtime at the same time. This type of parent task is best suited for use in an automated business process, where it can queue its child task(s) as described in Using Collaboration Tasks in a Process.

In My webMethods. On the Task Engine Administration page of My webMethods, you can specify one or more of the task types available in the runtime environment as a child collaboration task for a task type. This enables the user to be able to select from the specified collaboration task types when creating a new collaboration task on the Collaboration tab of the task they are working with (with proper permissions, and assuming the task is enabled for collaboration).

This type of parent-child relationship is best suited for use in an manual situation, where the user can queue collaboration task(s) as described in Using Collaboration Tasks Manually.

When you define a parent-child relationship in Designer, you are able to configure both the parent and child tasks in whatever custom manner you need to address a complex human activity. In this case, you are a creating and configuring the parent and child tasks with a specific relationship and specialized parent-child behavior.

The parent-child mechanism in My webMethods is more informal and enables you to define a parent-child relationship between any two task types available in the runtime environment. As these tasks have already been configured in Designer, the amount of functionality shared by the two tasks will be limited.

In both cases, the parent and child tasks run within a single collaboration process and task comments and attachments can be shared, as described in About Task Comments and Attachments Sharing.

Note that it is possible for a single task type to be both a parent task and a child collaboration task at the same time. For example, suppose you have three task types, Task1, Task2, and Task3. Task2 can be a collaboration task for parent task Task1, and Task2 can also be a parent task for collaboration task Task3.