Task Engine 10.11 | Task Engine Webhelp | webMethods Task Engine User's Guide | Understanding webMethods Tasks | About Collaboration Tasks | Using Collaboration Tasks in a Process
 
Using Collaboration Tasks in a Process
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 the parent task so that when specific business data is received by the parent task, one or more collaboration tasks are created and assigned to specific roles, groups, 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 new order business process 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 zip code or other designator describing the service area.
Depending on the specified service type and location contained in the pipeline for each individual order, the business process task can queue one child task to the required installation team, and another collaboration task to 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 webMethods BPM Task Development Help.