Work Item States

A work item is always in one of a small number of defined states.

Some of the operations used to manipulate work items cause an item to change its state, as defined in Work Item State Transitions. The following table shows the possible states.

Work Item State Meaning
(Created) This is a private state, accessed only by services that are restricted for internal use.
Offered This is the initial state of every work item that is made available on the BPM runtime. The work item is offered to those resources who correspond to the organizational entities specified at design time, and is placed in their work list.
Allocated The work item is assigned to a particular resource to be worked on. A work item may be in the Allocated state more than once in its life cycle, since it can be reallocated to different resources.
Opened A work item is Opened when a resource (a user) begins work on it, either by selecting it from a work list or by having it automatically allocated and opened.
Suspended A work item is suspended if its parent process instance is suspended.
Cancelled An open work item is cancelled when its parent process instance is cancelled. Work items that are not open are deleted when their parent process instance is cancelled.

A cancelled work item can be closed by calling closeWorkItem with no associated data. No other operations may affect it.

Pended The work item is assigned to a particular resource, who has done some work on it, but not yet completed that work.

The work item’s form has been opened and closed (not cancelled), and data fields may have been modified and saved.)

Note: Pended and Allocated are similar states. The difference is that Pended means the work item has already been worked on. Allocated means that it has not already been worked on. You cannot use skipWorkItem on a Pended work item.
PendHidden If a work item is Pended with a hiddenPeriod specified, it cannot be accessed for the time defined in that hiddenPeriod.

When the hiddenPeriod expires, the work item is returned to the state it was in before it was hidden. (An Allocated work item that was hidden returns to its Allocated state. A Pended work item that was hidden returns to its Pended state.)

Completed The final state of a work item in the BPM runtime, when work on an Opened work item has been completed. It is no longer on the system and cannot be affected by any API operations.