Dynamic Shared By for Group Tasks

AmyRush

I'm hunting for a mechanisim to make the Shared by id's in the group task more dynamic. Has anyone done anything cool with group tasks?

Migrateduser

Generally with a CGITask or ExternalTask you add and remove groups and users associated with another task using the command line tools iwaddtaskgroup, iwaddtaskuser, iwrmtaskgroup and iwrmtaskuser. There are probably OpenAPI equivalents if you are using JSP/Java, but then you either need a session ID (available to CGITask) or to specify a username and password in your code (which may not be a great solution if you are using ExternalTask).

You first have to determine the ID of the task to change properties of, which you can do with iwgettaskbyname (somehow the code that changes the users/groups has to know the name of the task that was created by the workflow). This won't work if someone changes the name of the task for which you want to alter users/groups, which they can do through the GUI if they have some level of control (I haven't figured out how to disable this), so when the job is created you might want to log somewhere (maybe a job variable) the ID of the task that needs to be altered later.

Be aware of how this affects the tasks that send email notification regarding the task you are changing the sharedby for. If you use command line parameters in the ExternalTask to tell the email process which users/groups to send email to, I am not aware of any way to change the v attribute of the command element in workflow XML (to change the command line parameters to the new users/groups), so this may not work for you (it's a bad idea anyway). If you use task variables to control who the email goes to you would have to update those variables (which may mean logging the IDs of the tasks that send email as well as the tasks that you are changing ownership of). Best is to have the email process parse the XML of the task it is sending notification about for groups and users and send email to them.