Configuring a Task as Manual Ad-Hoc

The manual ad-hoc activity allows you to define one or more standalone tasks (with no incoming / outgoing flow) in a business process that are executed zero or more times during the lifetime of a process instance. An ad-hoc activity only becomes available for manual invocation when it is enabled via the preconditions and the user holds the necessary privileges to start and cancel that activity.

Note: This feature is not available for pageflows.
You can have a number of ad-hoc activities in a process. Their preconditions determine when they become available for execution by permitted users.

Procedure

  1. Check the Ad-hoc Activity Marker on the General tab of the properties on a User task or Call Sub-Process task.
  2. Click on Ad-Hoc Configuration Properties. The Ad-Hoc Configuration tab opens.
  3. General: optionally select Interrupt main process until completion.
    This pauses the main process flow, resuming on completion of the ad-hoc activity. It does not stop you processing currently active work items or sub-processes, event sub-processes or other ad-hoc activities. However note that data will not be returned to the process instance until it re-activates.
  4. Check Manual Invocation.
  5. Optionally check Allow multiple invocations. If you check this, you can manually invoke the activity more than once after it has been enabled.
  6. Access: in addition to defining whether users have the ability to cancel an ad-hoc activity using a system action (see System Actions Reference in TIBCO Business Studio Concepts), optionally it is possible to define whether a user can cancel a specific ad-hoc activity by specifying Organization privileges that the user must possess.
  7. Enablement: Define the condition under which the activity is enabled and executed automatically.
    • Initializer Activities: (optional) Select one or more Initializer Activities which are activities which are in the same process. The precondition is not evaluated until one of these has completed.
    • Precondition: Set an optional precondition script that controls enablement of the ad-hoc activity. The automatic ad-hoc activity is invoked every time the precondition is changed from false to true. So the activity may be invoked many times.
    Note: For manual ad-hoc activities, specifying enablement is optional, so it not mandatory to specify either the initializer activity or the precondition script.
    Note: The condition must be a boolean expression which evaluates to true. The condition has to go from true > false > true in order to retrigger so you must reset the result of the expression to false before it can become true again.