Worklist Manager Service Engine (WLMSE)

Overview Business Process, Worklist and Task Definition? Why a separate Worklist Manager SE? Worklist Manager SE architecture. Supported Features. Future direction. Demo. Q & A and feedback?

Business Process, Worklist and Task Definition A business process is a flow of work, broken out as a series of steps, or activities, which are required to complete a business transaction. The business process activities may require application and/or human behavior for completion. Two kinds of business process: Automated Business Process Manual (User Interaction) Business Process Worklist is the work items assigned to user in a business process for manual interaction with human participant. A task definition can provide a definition of what a task is, whom it should be assigned to, escalation, notification and time-out etc.

Worklist continued Workflow standards are supposed to provide human intervention. WFMC's XPDL (Huge and complex) Workflow Types Process Centric Document Centric BPEL BPEL is Business Process Execution Language for Web Service IBM/SAP's BPEL4PEOPLE for Human interaction in a BPEL process. (Not seen in practice)

Overview Business Process, Worklis and Task Definition? Why a separate Worklist SE? Worklist SE architecture. Supported Features. Future direction. Demo. Q & A and feedback?

Why a separate Worklist SE? BPEL does not provide human interaction. Extending BPEL with new custom extension is cumbersome. (JCAPs does it) Clear separation of human interaction/task related functionality into a separate component. A simple language to define task functionality. Standard web service interface exposed, so can be reused.

Human Aspects in Business Process Following use cases are typical Task usually have input and output. Task assignment to user/groups. Provide a list of task to a user. Task escalation to users/groups, Task escalation chain. Task time-out. Task delegation to users/groups. Task notification. Task history. Task renewal. Task chain. Task repetition. Parallel Task.

Overview Business Process, Worklist and Task Definition? Why a separate Worklist SE? Worklist SE architecture Supported Features Future direction Demo Q & A and feedbacks?

Worklist SE Architecture

Worklist SE Architecture Follows standard BPEL Invoke activity to interact with WF SE. The decision/logic to do human intervention is done in BPEL. (i.e. When a human intervention is required) The decision/logic about what to do after a task output is received is done in BPEL. Worklist SE provides task state persistence. (i.e. task current state, task input/output data persistence etc). Executes a simple task definition xml based language. Assigns tasks to users/groups. Provides task list operations to a client. Ex: getTaskList(). ClaimTask(), checkInTask(), checkOutTask() and completeTask() etc. Supports task escalation, time-out. Uses custom reliability protocol for reliability and recovery.

Workflow SE Interaction with other components

Overview Business Process, Worklist and Task Definition? Why a separate Worklist SE? Worklist SE architecture Supported Features Future direction Demo Q & A and feedbacks?

Supported Features Task creation and assignment to users/groups. Task Escalation. Task Time-out. Client API. Task Specific API. Uses user security subject propagation through JavaEE SE for showing user specific task list. Support for recovery and reliability. (almost) XForm support for task input and output instance. (Basic support available now) XForm generation in Worklist project. (Basic support available now) Generic Task List Web Application with XForm rendering. (Basic support available now)

Client API Client API is a static wsdl implemented by Worklist SE. User can use client API to interact with task management service of Worklist SE. Following are the operations available: GetTaskList ClaimTask CompleteTask GetTaskInput GetTaskOutput SetTaskOutput ReassignTask RevokeTask GetTaskXForm

Task Specific API Task specific API is a dynamic wsdl implemented by Worklist SE for each task definition. User can use task specific API to interact with task management service of Worklist SE in a more data type safe way. Example: GetApprovePurchaseInput GetApprovePurchaseOutput SetApprovePurchaseOutput

Overview Business Process, Worklist and Task Definition? Why a separate Worklist SE? Worklist SE architecture Supported Features Future direction Demo Q & A and feedbacks?

Future direction Support for automatic xform generation for task input and output. (Done) Support for xpath expressions. Conditional/Dynamic assignment UI support. (Tools for Task Definition, Xform generation etc.) Support for clustering. Task Filtering. Support Access Manager. Support for more human workflow use cases. Delegation Notification

Clustering Support for load balancing and fail over. Follow the similar clustering approach as available in BPELSE. Share state using single persistence. Heart beat approach.

Clustering

Overview Business Process, Worklist and Task Definition? Why a separate Worklist SE? Worklist SE architecture Supported Features Future directions Demo Q & A and feedbacks?

Demo

Q&A