In-baskets

You use an in-basket to view, open, and work with work items assigned to you or others. An in-basket displays IBM® Business Automation Workflow work items.

Typically, the in-basket widget contains a separate tab for your personal in-basket and for each role in-basket that is associated with everyone who has your role.

The personal in-basket displays the work items that are assigned directly to you. You can select any work item in your in-basket, open it to complete the item, reassign it to someone else, or view its attachments or data fields. The application designer can prevent users from reassigning work items.

IBM Business Automation Workflow V 18.0.0.2The personal in-basket also lists work items from the IBM Workflow Server that are already claimed by the current user or are available to be claimed. These are external work items that were created and started in the IBM Business Automation Workflow 18.0.0.2 release. Earlier Business Automation Workflow work items that were started from an older Business Automation Workflow release will not be shown.

A role in-basket provides access to work items that are assigned to a group of people who share the same role. The in-basket can be configured to display a list of work items from which anyone in that role can select the next item to work on. Alternatively, the in-basket can be configured to display only a button that you click to open the next item to work on.

You can move a work item from the role in-basket to your own in-basket for processing. You can also process the work item from the role in-basket. Because access to a role in-basket is determined by the person who designed the application that you are using, you might not be able to see a specific role in-basket. Additionally, you might not be able to reassign work items or move work items to your personal in-basket.

The all assigned work in-basket displays a list of all the open work items that are assigned to users. Work items that are assigned to roles are not listed. You can filter the list to display only the work that is assigned to a specific user. Only users in specific roles can access this in-basket. Access is determined by the person who designed the application that you are using.

Important: By default, the property values displayed in the in-basket are updated even if you merely save changes to a work item. This can be disabled if a business analyst updates the Event Update flag for properties to FALSE in Process Designer.
You can filter the items in in-baskets based on the filter criteria configured for you. The filter restricts the items that are displayed for faster access and minimizes the time that you spend locating items in your inbox. For example, you might have a filter for high priority items. As you enter the filtering conditions, remember:
  • The conditions are case-sensitive.
  • If you exceed the maximum length of a string data field, you get a message stating that the In-basket widget cannot get the queue elements. Character limits might vary depending on your language.
  • The number of items shown reflects the total number of filtered work items that are in the in-basket. The paging size is configurable using the property "Number of work items to be displayed at once during scrolling in the work items page" in the IBM Business Automation Workflow client plugin.
  • To include special characters in a filter entry, use the \ character before the special character. For example, for nov_2014, enter nov\_2014.
You can do the following actions with in-baskets by clicking My Inbox or another tabbed page:
Apply filters
Filters can reduce the number of work items that are shown.
Open work items
You can double-click a work item to open it. By default, the work item opens in a new page that is named Work Details.
Open the next work item
If an in-basket is configured to automatically display the next work item, you can open the next work item by clicking Complete.
View work item details
View more information about the work item on the Work Details page. Each work item can be associated with a case. From the Work Details page, you can:
  • View information about the work item and information about the associated case.
  • Edit work item data, including case properties.
  • View, check out or check in, and edit the properties of documents that are attached to the work item. You can check out, check in, cancel checkout, or view properties for documents that are stored only in the content repository. For FileNet® P8 documents, you can select the version of the document that you want to work with.
  • Add a comment to the work item for others to read.
  • Attach another document to the work item by clicking Add.
    Restriction: You can attach any document, including system files such as workflows and entry templates, only if they are stored in the content repository.
  • Dispatch the work item to the next step by clicking Complete or one of the response buttons configured for the work item.