Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
some decisions, you can usually store the metadata about the document inside the reposit-
ory and use that information inside the process' context.
Web Process Designer also provides us with an option in the aforementioned menu to
automatically generate all the task forms. This will create a generic implementation of the
task forms. The main responsibility of generic implementations of task forms is to get the
task's input and output information. Based on this mapping, provided by the BPMN file,
we can construct a dynamic form that will display all of the input and provide simple form
fields to fill all of the task output. The kinds of output a mechanism like this could handle
are as follows:
• Text input fields
• Password/hidden text fields
• Calendar components to handle dates
• Select lists (list of values)
• Multiselection lists
• Checkboxes/radio buttons
The previously mentioned visual components are available in most of the UI-related
frameworks. They can be enough to start working on a generic initial form display, but
eventually, we will want to provide as much real-world information to the end user as they
need to do their job more efficiently. This is one of the most important steps toward im-
proving the performance of business processes. Depending on the nature of the task, we
need to create custom components to deal with the interactions of domain-specific users.
External components can be used to render our forms, so we need to search and decide
which component is best for each one of our forms' needs. Also, each of these task forms
can be handled as a knowledge asset, which will be used as a bridge between the process
and the users. The eventual task form that the user sees is the combination of a form
definition used as a template and input data from the task to populate the said template.
We need to understand that this is just one possible solution to enable the user interaction.
We need to be open minded about how we can expose the task lists and task forms so that
users can easily access the information required to complete their tasks.
The following are some of the things that we can do to improve how the end users access
the information related to Human tasks:
• Provide mobile implementations for task lists and task forms
• E-mail-based services
