This topic applies only to the IBM Business Automation Workflow Advanced configuration.

Setting up a user interface for your human task

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This topic only applies to BAW, and is located in the BAW repository. Last updated on 2025-03-13 12:15
The human task editor provides various client types that you can use to customize a user interface through which users can interact with the tasks in the runtime environment.

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A client delivers task-related information to a staff member in the form of an interactive application. You can generate various types of clients for your human tasks, and use the generated clients to customize a user interface through which users can interact with the tasks in the runtime environment. Or, you can use generated clients to quickly demonstrate a human workflow, for example, as a proof of concept or prototype.

Using the client generator, you can generate clients for both stand-alone human tasks that exist independently of a BPEL process, and inline human tasks that have access to the execution context a BPEL process. You can create one client for all the human tasks in a module, or generate one client per task. You can also generate one client for all human tasks in multiple processes or modules.

You might want to provide a choice of user interfaces, clients with different functionality for different roles, or basic clients that can be reused by changing their appearance.

User interfaces for your human tasks can make use of several types of technology. The human task editor provides a User Interface section to add technology-specific configuration settings to a human task. For some of the client technology types included by default, the corresponding property page allows the creation or selection of visualization files that match the Business Object data structure used by the human task.

There are two routes to creating user interfaces for your human tasks. A human task user interface wizard can be used by selecting one or more human tasks in the Business Integration folder view. The wizard allows you to rapidly generate various user interfaces. The second route is to use the human task editor. There is a section on the canvas called User Interface and you can add user interface settings to your task using the + button. Some of the property pages where you specify the UI settings offer the possibility to create visualization artifacts for the selected interface technology. Most situations can be arrived at using either of these two methods but there are some considerations you should make before taking either route:
  • To create user interfaces for more than one task, the wizard is the more efficient choice, since you can create user interfaces for multiple tasks, even if they are not in the same module. For JSF, the wizard creates not only the generated artifacts but also stand-alone web applications to use the generated artifacts.
  • To work in a Heritage Process Portal space, create an HTML-Dojo user interface and use it in the Task Information widget.