Step 5: Optionally, Add Manual Work Activities The activities in the Manual Work palette are useful for automated business processes that have a few steps that require user interaction. This could include handling of unexpected situations or other activities such as credit approval or handling of customers from abroad if the company usually deals with local customers. The functionality is implemented by two shared configuration resources and four activities: Shared Configuration Resources • Workflow Schema—The data associated with a ManualWork task. This is the data a user needs to complete the task. The user can change any of the data associated with a task. A workflow schema supports string, int, date, and document data types. • Workflow Connection— The connection to the TIBCO InConcert workflow server. This server is used to track and manage manual tasks. Manual Work Activities • Assign Work—Creates a new task (with associated data) and assigns it to the specified pool of users. A user then acquires the task, views the data supplied by the activity, and completes the work. The process definition can either wait for the user to complete the work or it can continue processing and later query for the status of the task. • Download Document—Manual work schemas can contain elements to hold documents. An example of a document is a loan application that must be attached to a credit request. The document may be any type, for example, Microsoft Word, PDF, and so on. Documents can be uploaded or downloaded to a manual work task by way of the web interface TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks provides for managing manual work tasks. This activity allows you to download a document from an existing manual work task into a process variable. • Get Work Status—Retrieves the current status of a task that was previously created with the Assign Work activity. Normally you use this activity to determine if the task has been completed or if there are any errors. • Modify Work—This activity allows administrator users to change the status of an existing task created with the Assign Work activity to one of the following: − Update — modifies the data associated with an uncompleted task − Complete — completes the task − Reassign — reassigns the task to a pool of users • Wait for Completion—Waits for the completion of the task for the specified period. This is useful if the timeout for the Assign Work activity has passed and you wish to wait for an additional amount of time.
