This topic applies only to the IBM Business Process Manager Advanced configuration.

Setting up a user interface for your human task

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.

About this task

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:

If you want 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.
If you want to create an IBM® Form to directly interface with this task in this module, for example to use the form in the Task Information widget in a Heritage Process Portal space, use the human task editor. For IBM Forms and JSF, the wizard creates not only the generated artifacts but also stand-alone web applications to use the generated artifacts.
If you want to work in a Heritage Process Portal space but do not have access to IBM Forms, you can create an HTML-Dojo user interface and use it in the Task Information widget.
If you want to use an existing IBM Form for your user interface you must use the human task editor and select the IBM Form in the Properties view.
Note: The structure of the IBM Form must match the business object structure of the interface used by the human task. The simplest way to ensure this, is to create the human task using the existing IBM Form as a template. To do this, select File > New > Business Object from IBM Forms to launch the Generate a new BPEL process from IBM Forms wizard. Using this wizard create a BPEL process to contain the generated human tasks, create the human tasks and select the IBM Forms, the structure of which will be used to generate the interface used by the human task.

Example

You want to use the IBM Forms technology to visualize a human task, you have several routes to achieving this goal. One option is to specify or generate an IBM Form on the IBM Forms User Interface Settings property page in the human task editor. You can then use the form in the Task Information widget to work with the task. Another option is to use the UI generation wizard to create a stand-alone web application. The wizard checks, if an IBM Form was specified on the corresponding property page. If a form is already configured, the wizard makes the generated application use it, otherwise it creates a form.