Follow-on tasks

Follow-on tasks support people when they want to delegate parts of their assigned work to other people, and the control over the completion of the work.

Follow-on tasks can be created from stand-alone task templates that are stored in the Business Process Choreographer database, from task templates created at run time, or by providing a new task model at run time. You can start a follow-on task from a to-do task or a collaboration task that has the supportsFollowOnTask attribute set to true. A follow-on task can have follow-on tasks of its own resulting in a chain of tasks.

The input message type of a follow-on task can be different from its predecessor task. If the input message type of the follow-on task is the same as that of the predecessor task, the input message content of the predecessor task is passed automatically to the follow-on task. The message content can be overwritten when the follow-on task is created or started.

For a chain of follow-on tasks, the output and fault message types of each of the follow-on tasks must be identical to those of the first task in the chain, because the last follow-on task in the chain returns the message to the calling component or person (originator). The output or fault message content of the parent task is always copied to the output or fault message of the follow-on task. These messages can be modified in the follow-on task and the changes are copied to the parent task.