Sending email to groups

I am using a modified version of iwsend_servlet_mail.ipl to send emails round my workflow. This is to basicaly to notify a user that they have a task waiting for them to complete. This works fine on a single user basis, however, how would you do this for a group task? i.e. how would you find all members of the group and send email to notify them there is a task for one fo them to take ownership of? This is becasue up until a person takes ownership of the task, a group task has an owner of <no user>.

another question. If i am a member of the group assigned to the group task. why would i not get an item in my to do list allowing me to take ownership when the job arrives at the group task. Yet if i do View->my jobs i see it is still there and awaiting someone to take ownership.

I am using NT 4 and TS 5.5.2.
Cheers.

Hazzie

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Migrateduser

I'm not sure how you accomplish this in Windows, but in Unix there is a built-in function called "getgrnam" that will return the members of a group. I'm sure there is an equivalent Windows utility to do such a thing. If you are a member of the group that a grouptask is assigned to, you should be getting the grouptask in your ToDo list. Could possibly be a role issue?

Dave Smith
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Adam Stoller

... modified version of iwsend_servlet_mail.ipl ... This works fine on a single user basis, however, how would you do this for a group task?

You might do better with a modified version of iwsend_mail.ipl - which already has provisions in it for handling multiple email addresses.

i.e. how would you find all members of the group and send email to notify them ... up until a person takes ownership of the task, a group task has an owner of < no user>.

Look at the Win32API::Net module for getting lists of users in groups - as part of the modification to your notification script, you should make sure to pass in the name of the 'next' task - take this information, look up the task (see TeamSite::WFtask for details), determine if it is a grouptask and if so, determine the members of the shared-by element - if the member is a group, use the routines in Win32API::Net to get the members.

Do this for all the members of the shared-by elements and *then* run that list through the email_mapping process, and take the results and use them for the To list of the email.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a method for getting the shared-by list currently in the WFtask module (I've just filed a request for this [#35462]) - you'll probably have to parse the output of iwgetwfobj taskid in order to determine this information.

If i am a member of the group assigned to the group task. why would i not get an item in my to do list allowing me to take ownership when the job arrives at the group task. Yet if i do View->my jobs i see it is still there and awaiting someone to take ownership.

Did you initiate the job? If so - that's why you see it in My Jobs. Are you *sure* you're a member of the sharedby element for that task?

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)

Hazzie

Cheers, Just what ineeded to know. I had started to mess with the win32api net module so glad you confirmed i was going down the right track.
The shared-by element confused me as to when it appears in the wft its shared by but when you query iwgetwfobj it becomes users but now at least i see the relationship. why have the same thing named differently?.

As to the group thing a little bit more reasearch on my behalf is needed.

Thanks for the comments.

Hazzie

Adam Stoller

The shared-by element confused me as to when it appears in the wft its shared by but when you query iwgetwfobj it becomes users but now at least i see the relationship. why have the same thing named differently?.

Hmm - interesting, never noticed that - my guess would be that it's an historical thing (groups might not have been supported in the first rendition) and that it seemed a non-backward compatible change to alter the name of the element after the release.

Nice catch.

--fish
(Interwoven Senior Technical Consultant)