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Workareas in Workflows

MahmoodA

I have a question regarding workareas in workflows. I have created an external task that copies a DCR from my workarea to the workareas of all the members in a specific group. Then I have a grouptask that assigns the review process of that DCR to that entire group.

How do I change the workflow's default workarea to point to the eventual task assignee's workarea (rather than mine) ?

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Jeremy

Hi,

One method would be to use the iwsettaskownerandarea CLT.
It allows you to set the owner of a task and the new area for that task.

HTH

Jeremy

Adam Stoller

Is the number of workareas a constant, or something that your externaltask is figuring out on-the-fly?

I.e., in order for you to have 1 grouptask per workarea where you've copied this DCR, you need to either have known up-front how many workareas (and hence how many grouptasks) were needed, or you'll have to created nested workflows (one per area) for each of them.

Assuming that you knew, in advance, the number of workareas, and that you used a simple task-naming scheme for all the grouptask's that were defined to review the work in the different workareas, the externaltask can create task objects for each of the grouptasks and then use the specific task object's SetArea() method to adjust the setting of the area for that specific task.

Note however, that you will also need to deal with updating all these workareas once you've submitted the DCR in the primary workarea - so the code can get a bit tricky there - I hope you got reasonably detailed designed documents going for how you're planning to achieve all this (it's do-able, just takes a bit of planning and coding)

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Migrateduser

The original poster said he wants the area changed once one of the members of the group takes ownership of the grouptask. This would eliminate the possibility of executing any CLT or doing anything in an externaltask. I don't think what he wants to do is possible using a grouptask. However it is an interesting concept.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

MahmoodA

Thanks for the replies. Ghoti, the number of workareas is determined by a config file that contains the user ids of the group.

The external task copies the DCR to every user in the group, regardless of assignee, before I reach the grouptask in the workflow. What I am trying to do is change the workflow's workarea within a grouptask (based on who takes the ownership of the task). Smitty77, what I have gathered from your reply is that this is not possible. Is this assumption correct? Also, can I change the workarea with some inline perl code, within the grouptask?

Thanks again.

Migrateduser

A grouptask is a manual task that requires action from the owner before proceeding to the next task in the workflow. The task itself is not capable of running any code that manipulates anything in the workflow. You'd need a cgitask or an externaltask for that. It's a chicken/egg problem. You need to know the person who takes ownerhip of the grouptask in order to change the area in the grouptask. But you can't change the area programatically after the person takes ownership. You could do it manually but that sort of defeats the purpose.

Per ghoti's suggestion, you might be able to devise some sort of complex design where instead of a grouptask you have several concurrent usertasks, each owned by a member of a group with its area pointing to its owner's workarea. You decide which usertask to execute, using a cgitask probably, to query who you want to take "ownership" of the process at that point. Then in the cgitask you can do whatever else you'd need to do with areas and such. The question is - who gets ownership of the task to choose who takes ownership of the usertask?

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

Jeremy

Ah yes - Guess I didn't read the problem correctly. My mistake.

Adam Stoller

Hmm - well the only way I could see *possibly* doing this is to have an iwat trigger fire on the even of someone taking ownership of the grouptask and then based on information about who took ownership, change the area associated with that task on the fly.

There is at least one reason why I don't like this idea - the trigger mechanism - it's post-operative meaning that the user who takes ownership of the task will have complete access to that task *while* you're attempting to change the area associated with it - and this strikes me as being fraught with potential problems and confusing error messages.

Do these users *really* need distinct workareas? grouptasks tend to work best in shared workareas.

Another possibility is that the grouptask is treated as a way-station, and that, once owned, the user then selects a transition which runs through an externaltask, performs the desired steps and lands them in a usertask with the correct area associated with it - this too is somewhat complex and confusing and requires extraneous menu selections/mouse clicks to achieve the desired result, which most users will not really appreciate.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

nipper

>I have a question regarding workareas in workflows. I have created an external task that copies a DCR from my workarea to the
>workareas of all the members in a specific group. Then I have a grouptask that assigns the review process of that DCR to that entire group.

>How do I change the workflow's default workarea to point to the eventual task assignee's workarea (rather than mine) ?

I think you need to take a deep breath & rethink the approach. You can't get there from here.

What are you trying to do ? Don't talk in terms of workareas and DCRs, talk about content, & users & what the disparate
users do.

Andy

MahmoodA

I am attempting to create a review process. Individual A will create a DCR and send it to Group B to be reviewed, during this time the DCR should be copied to the workareas of Group B. One person from Group B will then either approve or reject the DCR, if it is approved it is submitted, if it is rejected it is sent back to individual A. One thing to note is that Group B is determined from a config file that contains a list of users.

Ghoti I am going to explore this possibility, although I feel I may run into some issues:

"Another possibility is that the grouptask is treated as a way-station, and that, once owned, the user then selects a transition which runs through an externaltask, performs the desired steps and lands them in a usertask with the correct area associated with it - this too is somewhat complex and confusing and requires extraneous menu selections/mouse clicks to achieve the desired result, which most users will not really appreciate"

Edited by MahmoodA on 04/28/04 10:41 AM (server time).

Migrateduser

You would need to copy the file before the grouptask. The "take ownership" part and the "approval" part of the grouptask are not 2 distinct tasks. They are 2 parts of the same task. You can't do any processing in between the 2.

Dave Smith
Sr. Software Engineer
Nike, Inc.
(503) 671-4238
DavidH.Smith@nike.com

james1

If Group B is not going to edit the DCR, could they just share a (read-only) grouptask in Individual A's workarea?

-- James

--
James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering

Edited by james on 04/28/04 11:15 AM (server time).

MahmoodA

James, I neglected to mention that I have to give the option of editing the DCR to Group B.

james1

Perhaps you can give the (read-only) grouptask a transition called "Edit this DCR" that (1) copies the DCR to the reviewers workarea, and then (2) transitions to a usertask owned by the reviewer, set in that reviewer's workarea.

I also wonder, in your plan where the DCR is copied to multiple reviewer workareas simultaneously, what would happen if multiple reviewers edited the DCR independently, or how those copies would ever get cleaned up after the review process if over.

-- James

--
James H Koh
Interwoven Engineering

Adam Stoller

Perhaps you can give the (read-only) grouptask a transition called "Edit this DCR" that (1) copies the DCR to the reviewers workarea, and then (2) transitions to a usertask owned by the reviewer, set in that reviewer's workarea.

I think this probably works best and removes the need to make N copies of the file all over the place - though you probably want to follow it up with: (3) after the review task is over, copy the modified DCR back into the original author's workarea -- assuming that eventually everything will be submitted from there (or from yet another workarea which will have had files copied from the original author's workarea...)

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

MahmoodA

Perhaps you can give the (read-only) grouptask a transition called "Edit this DCR" that (1) copies the DCR to the reviewers workarea, and then (2) transitions to a usertask owned by the reviewer, set in that reviewer's workarea.

James, I think this seems like the best alternative also, but how do I store who took ownership of the grouptask? Would I have to do something within the grouptask?

Ghoti, that is a good call, I should probably copy the modified DCRs back to the originators workarea for the submit.

MahmoodA

Nevermind, James, I was able to find an old thread on the grouptask owner. Thanks for the help.