Types of Tasks

Tasks can be of a number of types, each of which is represented by a different icon. Tasks can be user tasks, service tasks, script tasks, send tasks, or receive tasks.

User Tasks

User tasks are those that require human interaction with a software application.

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.

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.

Service Tasks

Service tasks can ideally complete without human interaction (for example, sending an automatic email notification).

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.

Send Tasks

Send tasks are used to call a REST service without waiting for a response before following the send-task's outgoing flow.

They can be paired with a receive task or event to form a request response operation.

Incoming Request Tasks

Incoming Request tasks are used to wait for an invocation -- via the process REST API -- from a system or person outside of the process.

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 an incoming request 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 Data Fields and Parameters).