Setting the work schedule for a process

The work schedule determines the number of working hours that business users are available to complete work and therefore directly affects the due date work schedule of process instances and activities.

About this task

The default work schedule for all processes is specified in the 99Local.xml configuration file. If you do not specify a work schedule for a process, or if you leave the settings as use default, due date calculations for process instances are based on the <default-work-schedule> in this configuration file. However, the default settings are used only if the timer-use-activity-schedule property in the 100Custom.xml file is set to true. If the timer-use-activity-schedule property is not set, or if it is set to false, the default-work-schedule property is ignored, and the 24x7 calendar is used to calculate the timer's fire date.

If you want to customize the default work schedule, add the corresponding elements to your 100Local.xml configuration file. For an example of configuring the time zone, see Specifying a default system time zone. If you select use default as the time zone setting and you do not have a customized work schedule, Central Standard Time (CST) is used as time zone for due date calculations and the value of the JavaScript tw.system.defaultTimeZone constant. If you use the default time zone, and it differs from your system time zone, you might get unexpected results when due dates are calculated or when you use the JavaScript tw.system.calculateBusinessDate() method to calculate business dates.

Procedure

In the Work Schedule section on the Overview tab, specify values for the following parameters. You can use JavaScript expressions with predefined variables for all the work schedule values.

The Time Schedule specifies the normal business hours in which work can be completed.
Timezone specifies the timezone that you want to apply to running instances of the current process.
The Holiday Schedule is a list of exceptions to the normal time schedule.

To understand how the values of these parameters affect the due date, see Due dates for process instances and activities.

Tip: If you expect some activities to be completed by users with a specific work schedule, you can specify a different work schedule for that activity in the Properties view for the activity.

You can also write an IBM® BPM service to dynamically set schedules. For more information, see Creating and managing time and holiday schedules.