Process Multiple Instances from workspace

Question

Hi,
In our project we have a requirement, where at a particular actiity the user has only an option to choose yes or no and depending upon the option the next activity woudl be decided. We currently know that a screenflow can be implemented for that activity, using which the user can select the correct option. But for this he would have to open each instance and perform the operation. As there would be many items which need to be worked on at the same time, the users would like to perform the operation directly from the workspace without opening the screenflow. Could we have an option of selecting multiple items from workspace and have an option to process them at the same time depending upon the choice(can be probably displayed along with abort, consult,etc under operations).
Thanks,
Sree.

Answer 1

Yes - there's a way that this can be done, but it's not out of the box.
Sure there are other ways that would work just as well, but at a high level - here's an outline of one approach to updating a variable in a list of work item instances that are in a particular activity from one screen:
1. Add a new BPM Object that has attributes to store the desired new value and a group with an attribute to store a checkbox (Boolean), another attribute to store the instance id (string), another attribute to store the present value
2. Create a method in the BPM Object to search for the list of all the instances in the particular activity, get their instance id and the current value of the instance variable. There is a pretty common technique called a filter that can be used inside logic to accomplish this. You'd base your filter on work item instances inside a specific process that are currently sitting in a particular activity in that process. You would use the list of work item instances returned to populate the group you created in the first step.
3. Create a presentation in the BPM Object to display the list of instances in the activity. Display all the items in the group with the selection box in the first column to let the end user select the one or more instances to be updated with the new value.
4. Add a method to be invoked in the BPM Object once the Submit button on your presentation has been clicked. This method would go through your group and see which items in the list have been selected (the Boolean attribute) and then update each of these variables for each of the work item instances (these would be identified by the instance id also in the group's row for the item selected).
5. Add a Global activity that will use the BPM Object's presentation to display the list of work item instances to the end user to prompt them to perform the mass variable update.
Hope this helps get you started,
Dan