Design and implement a custom Inbox and my team performance task list using BPM V8

Design and implement a custom Inbox and my team performance task list using IBM Business Process Manager V8

Brief introduction

IBM Business Process Manager (IBM BPM) provides a number of useful features to manage business processes, including the inbox of process participants. Although it is recommended that you use out-of-the-box features as much as possible, in some cases the default implementation may not meet your requirements. In this case, you might want to design and implement a custom inbox. This article provides a design method and an example implementation for this custom inbox. Similarly, the default my team performance provides a good way for teams managers to monitor the tasks assigned to their teams. However, in some cases, users may want to customize the implementation of the My team performance task list. This article also demonstrates how to perform this customization.

In one of the business processes implemented in IBM BPM, all user tasks are displayed in the participant's Inbox. The Inbox task list is one of the most critical components in the process of determining assignment and task flow. The default implementation provided in the Process Portal shows all tasks assigned to the user or to all the roles that the user belongs to.

The download section of this article provides an example TWX export file for the sample process application in the IBM BPM V8. You must use the Process Admin console to create the necessary users and user groups before you can run the sample code, as described in creating users and groups for the sample scenario.

Examples of scenarios where you may need to customize your Inbox task List

In some cases, the IBM BPM Inbox feature may not meet your specific requirements. The following are examples of two such scenarios:

An organization already has an employee portal

In this case, the organization already has a deeply developed and widely used employee Portal. The strategic goal of the organization is to make this portal a one-stop service point for all employee activities. Processes that use the IBM BPM implementation can be well used for activities initiated from this portal.

Process participants (often also employees of this organization) do not want to learn to use another user interface to perform their process work, and they prefer to view Inbox task lists and other information from their familiar employee portals.

Requires extensive customization

Need to perform important customizations for the out-of-the-box IBM BPM Inbox. In essence, these customizations are not decorative and functional. An example of this is the process involved in auditing tasks. For example, as soon as a process participant clicks on the "Audit Task" in the Inbox, they are directed to the detailed audit step. Depending on whether these steps are within the scope of the participants ' permissions, they can assign tasks to themselves or others. This type of customization may require implementing a custom inbox.

Comparison of design methods

There are several ways to design and implement custom inboxes. The advantages and disadvantages of these methods are given in table 1. In this article, we'll use the JavaScript API method.

Create users and Groups for sample scenarios

The sample scenarios used in this article contain the following groups and users, and you need to create them before you run the sample process application.

Service_agents: This group contains the service agents that will receive tasks from the process. There are three service agents in this group: Service_agent1, Service_agent2 and Service_agent3.

Temp_service_agents: To prove that this mechanism also applies to nested groups, we have added a group named Temp_service_agents to the Service_agents group. This group has a service agent named Temp_service_agent1, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Service_agents and Temp_service_agents Group

Service_supervisors: This group contains users who act as Service_agents's supervisor or "team manager", as shown in Figure 2. There is a user in this group named Service_supervisor1.

Figure 2. Service_supervisors Group

Figure 3 shows the user hierarchy of the sample scenario in the IBM BPM Process Admin Console.