Using team services to define dynamic teams

You can use team retrieval services to dynamically determine who is eligible to perform activities by using service flows. 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. To improve performance, the service 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, the 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.

Caching team service results

If appropriate, you can enable results caching for any team service. When enabled, the results of top-level 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. If the 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 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 linked service flow are not cached.