Developing Tasks Within a Process
If a business process you are developing includes human activities, you use the Software AG Designer UI Development perspective to develop tasks. Tasks are created within a special type of composite application called task application projects. You can create a single task within a project, or you can group multiple related tasks within a project. In the UI Development perspective, you can test and debug tasks you develop.
You can define how you want a task to behave when certain events occur. For example, you can specify that the task status should change to Critical when an uncompleted task reaches its expiration date. Software AG Designer provides a variety of built-in actions you can use, or you can call a service.
You can create a task application that uses data from a supported e-form as some or all of the task's business data. You can also implement e-form-enabled tasks with download and upload capability. This capability lets the task user:
Connect to
My webMethods Server or the
Content Service Platform to download the e-form data from the task in its original e-form format.
Disconnect from
My webMethods Server or the
Content Service Platform and work with the e-form in the local environment.
Reconnect to
My webMethods Server or the
Content Service Platform and upload the e-form.
My webMethods Server applies the modifications to the task business data.
User interfaces present tasks to end users. You can use the Software AG Designer UI Development perspective to design task user interfaces, which end users then view in the web browser-based My webMethods. Alternatively, you can use non-Software AG technologies such as Grails or Google Widget Toolkit to design task user interfaces. In this case, you use RESTful services to create the interaction between the user interface and tasks that are executing in the Task Engine.
After you develop a task, you drag and drop it onto a business process. If you have a complicated task, you might want to break it up into a series of simpler tasks, connected into a task workflow. For the end user, the task workflow appears as a seamless flow of task user interfaces in My webMethods. As the user completes each task in the workflow, the next user interface appears, eliminating the need for the user to locate each new task and open it manually.
When you are done developing a business process, you use Software AG Designer to deploy tasks to a My webMethods Server equipped with a Task Engine, so the process can invoke the tasks at run time.