Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved


Chapter 5 Working with Activities : Activity and Task Overview

Activity and Task Overview
An activity represents work that a company or organization performs using business processes. An activity can be atomic (it is not broken down into a finer level of detail) or non-atomic. Atomic activities are represented in the Process Editor by tasks. For more information about how BPMN defines activities and tasks, see http://www.bpmn.org.
When creating the TIBCO Business Studio Process, each time a different person, group, role, or system does something, an activity is added to the Process.
Activities may be triggered by events such as the receipt of an email, phone call or workflow item, and may involve making a judgement on the presented facts and performing an action (such as entering data to a computer system, phoning someone in the same or a different organization, and so on).
A task in a process diagram represents an atomic activity (one that cannot be further broken down). A task of an unspecified type looks like this in the Process Editor:
If the activities can be broken down into finer steps, they should be represented as Sub-Processes. The Activity Type is set in the Properties view.
User Tasks
User tasks are those that require human interaction with a software application. For example:
User tasks can be further configured for inbound and outbound parameters. Forms can be generated from the task’s input and output parameters, representing the information you want to present to and capture from the user.
You can also generate a pageflow process from a task Creating a Pageflow Process From a User Task.
TIBCO Business Studio Forms enables you to design, view, and test the forms you need to collect user input in a business process. You can create sophisticated forms without programming, and associate them with user tasks in order to provide richer user experiences for business process participants.
Manual Tasks
Manual tasks are those that are completed by a person without using software. For example:
Service Tasks
Service tasks can ideally complete without human interaction (for example, an automatic email notification or a web service). For example:
Script Tasks
Script tasks contain a set of instructions written in a scripting language (usually added to the step by the solution engineer) that will be executed in the runtime environment when the process is deployed and executed. For example:
Using the business analysis capability, you can add text to a script task to describe the desired behavior of the script. However, by switching to solution design capability or by clicking Provide Implementation Details in the Properties view for the task, you can enter JavaScript to a script task. For more information, see the relevant implementation guide.
Send Tasks
Send tasks are used to send messages to a system or person outside of the process (often using a web service):
They can be paired with a receive task or message event to form a request response operation (see Request Response Operation with Send and Receive Tasks).
Receive Tasks
Receive tasks are used to wait for a message from a system or person outside of the process (often using a web service). This type of task can be used to start a process as long as it has no incoming sequence flow and there are no start events in the process:
On the Interface tab, you can add parameters to a receive task; however, you cannot add data fields because data fields are used internally in a process, and parameters are in this case, inputs from an external process (for more information, see Creating Data Fields and Parameters).
Receive tasks can be paired with a send task or message event to form a request response operation (see Request Response Operation with Send and Receive Tasks).You must also ensure that incoming messages are received by the correct process instance. For more information, see Handling Incoming Messages Using Correlation Data.
Reference Tasks
Reference tasks refer to another task and prevent you from having to duplicate the same task several times in a process.
 
You can create a reference to another task using either the Reference Task gadget on the reference task, or in the Properties view for the reference task.
Creating a Reference with the Reference Task Gadget
A gadget is a graphical tool that allow you to easily create references. You can create references to tasks on the diagram using a gadget as follows:
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Drag the Reference Task gadget to the task to which you want to refer.
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Once you create a reference, you can click the Reference Task gadget to go to the referenced task, or drag the Reference Task gadget to create more references:
Creating a Reference in the Properties View
To create a reference to another task on the General tab of the Properties view for the task, complete the Referenced Task field by clicking and selecting a task from the list:
After you have a created a task reference, clicking Go To selects the target of the reference task and brings it into the visible part of the Process Editor (it also displays the Properties view for the task). To return to the previously-selected task, click on the toolbar.

Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved
Copyright © TIBCO Software Inc. All Rights Reserved