Using team services to define dynamic teams

You can use team retrieval services and team filter services to dynamically determine who is eligible to perform activities. A team retrieval service or team filter service can be either a service flow or a heritage integration service. Instead of using a statically defined team, you can use a team retrieval service that returns a list of team members and the name of a team of managers. You can use a team filter service to eliminate particular members from performing the associated activity. For example, you can implement a separation of duties policy, or remove members who are not available. To improve performance, these services or service flows can use results caching.

The structure of teams

Each team has a name, a list of members (users or groups) and, optionally, the name of a team of managers. Only the managers can perform managerial actions, but managers can also be members of the team that can perform an activity. Teams can be associated directly with activities, or assigned as default teams to lanes. Because any team can be assigned as the managers of another team, it is possible to define teams to reflect the managerial structure of your organization.

When a team is resolved dynamically by a team retrieval service or filtered by a team filter service, the service or service flow must return a Team object. The returned Team object consists of a list of team members in the members field and the optional fields; name for the name of the team (which is ignored), and managerTeam for the name of the team of managers.

Team retrieval service

Instead of defining static teams, with fixed members and fixed managers, you can create teams whose members and managers are dynamically resolved by a team retrieval service. The team retrieval service receives the name of the team as a string parameter, and returns the resolved team as a Team object. If necessary you can add extra input parameters that are required to resolve the team.

When you assign an activity to a team that is defined by a team retrieval service that uses extra parameters, you must define which environment variables or literal values are mapped onto each extra input parameter. If you want the team to be used as the managers of another team, you can only use additional input parameters that have default values that are defined for them.

Team filter service

There are times when you do not want the whole team to be assigned to a task, but rather a subset of the team. You can create team filter services to implement assignment policies. The team filter service takes the initially resolved team as a parameter and must return the filtered team as a Team object. If necessary you can add extra input parameters that are required to filter the team.

For example, to implement a separation of duties policy, you might need to remove the user who performed the previous activity from the list of users who can perform the next activity. In that case, the filter service needs an input parameter for the user ID that is to be removed from the input team.

If, for example, insurance claims above a certain threshold can be handled only by particular team members, you might create a filter named High claim value team filter that uses an input parameter claimValue to filter out any users that are not qualified to work high value claims.

For more examples, see the developerWorks article Teams in Business Process Manager V8.5, Part 2: Developing services for dynamic team resolution.

Caching team service results

If appropriate, you can enable results caching for any team retrieval service or team filter service. When enabled, the results of top-level services or service flows are cached for unique combinations of input parameter values to improve performance. By default, results are refreshed after 12 hours, but this value can be changed. By default, the cache stores up to 4096 results. You can change the size of the cache by including a value for <service-result-cache-size> in the 100Custom.xml file, inside the <server merge="mergeChildren"> section. If the service or service flow is called and the number of cached results exceeds the defined cache size, the least recently used result is removed so that there is space for the new result.

Restriction: The results cache setting works only for top-level services or service flows. When a service is called by another service, the results cache setting for the nested service is ignored and the results for the nested service or linked service flow are not cached.