◷ Reading Time: 4 minutes
Types
In a Human Workflow, there are multiple types of Tasks:
- Receive Task
- Human Task
- Single Participant
- Multi Participant
Receive Task
A Receive Task is usually used when Workflow Instance is waiting to receive a response from an application or system. A receive task cannot have any participant or owner definition, because there is no assignment of task involved. Anyone that has permission can respond to the task.
Human Task
In a Human Task, the Workflow Instance reaches the task:
- Creates Work
- Creates a corresponding Work Item for the Work
- Assigns the Work Item to the participant of the Task
As described above, Human workflow is all about task assignment. For each Human Task there can be multiple participants.
Read more about how to define a Task Assignment
Definitions
In a Workflow topic, some terminologies are used repeatedly. These are shown below. Defining them upfront makes it easier to understand the role of each one when modeling a Workflow.
Human Task
A Human Task is a particular activity in a Workflow that enables the interaction of humans and systems. A Human Task can create Work and assign Work Items to Participants and the Owner of the Task.
Human Tasks are designed to enable modeling expectations and the outcome of a Task.
Work
Work is an instance of a Human Task that holds all of the related Work Items. It includes information about the Owner, Participant, Expectation and Outcomes of the Task definition.
Work Item
A Work Item is a unit of work that belongs to Work and is assigned to a Participant in order to carry out the work that is aligned with the Task Expectation and Outcomes.
Participant
A Participant of a Task is a human actor that must carry out a task to achieve a specific Outcome of the Task. Participants and their Roles are managed in the execution environment (i.e., Debugger, Your Application, Active Directory, etc.).
Outcome
The Outcome of a Task defines different outputs (i.e., result, action, etc.) of the task. Depending on what outcome is chosen by the Participant, the Workflow will continue on a different execution path.
Parallel and Sequential
When a task is assigned to Participants, they can act upon it in a different order.
Sequential passes the task one-by-one to participants and each receives the task one after another as soon as the current participant finishes the Work Item. So not all of the Participants receive the Work Item at the same time.
Static Sequential
In a static behavior role and persons to take care of tasks are known. So the Workflow uses Human Task -(as many as required) to pass the case to different people.
Dynamic Sequential
In a dynamic behaviour, the actors that take care of the task are based on many different conditions i.e. based on budget, value of contract, time of the year, organisation’s post and etc. These will be handled by using
- The decision to identify roles
- Directory service to resolve the users based on roles
- Loop to assign the task one by one to individuals
Parallel
Parallel allows you to assign the Task (Work Item) to all Participants of the task at the same time. So the Task becomes available for all of them at once. This enables interaction between groups.
Above example is representing a dynamic parallel behaviour.
The Interaction between them will define the outcome of the Task. This Interaction Policy enables the options shown below:
- All Responses
- First Responses
- Majority Vote
- Vote
- Weighted Vote