Handle to a Task in BPM

Question

Hi active contributors of BPM,
I have a scenario where one of the steps in a process is a human activity. There is a WebDynpro UI corresponding to the task mapped to the human activity, which works well. However, an email with a custom MS Outlook form will be sent to the corresponding owner of the task when task gets generated. The user can respond to the task directly either through the Outlook form itself or using the SAP Portal / UWL. So, I would like to if there are any APIs / interfaces that could be used to trigger the task completion programmaticlly from my code similar to how it happens on click of an WebDynpro UI element mapped with the Complete event.
Any pointers will be highly appreciated.
BR,
Bala

Answer 1

Hi Bala,
As Benny already pointed out it's cruicial for the processes that the users management is built on the repository provided by the UME. If you want to bypass this anyway and want to implement the completion by a service user then you could try splitting up your process into the 'sending part' and the 'receiving part':
'the sending part'
This particular process is responsible for gathering all the needed data (via services, UI input, ...) and finally sends out the mails to the users.
'the receiving part'
Here it is getting a little bit more tricky: You could implement a message driven bean which is waiting for the responses of your users and queues them up for further processing. Then - for each item - it extracts the needed data and starts off a new process instance which could then do the final processing.
Of course one major drawback is that you will lose the 'overall process view' in that case by decoupling the both steps. Nevertheless you could benefit of NW BPM in each of them.
What might be interesting for you are the so called offline forms that have been mentioned in the thread below.
Galaxy Frontends
Galaxy Frontends
Best regards,
Martin