"reminder" tasks

[memius]

What is best practice to implement small 'reminder' tasks ?

I will explain.
At my current project it is possible that a user enters some data, is interupted by some higher priority task and afterwards needs to continue entering that data.
Or ... the user needs a reminder that tells him he still needs to send that email he started once (or that letter, ...)

At this moment, there is an existing 'workflow' component (home written, non standard implementation), that will be replaced with jBPM.

So .. we ask ourselves how we can fix this reminder issue in a neat way.
At this moment these tasks are included in a workflow. Meaning that it is kind of a workflow with one task (benefits are that you can see that task in a task list without much effort).

But how should this be done ? Do you actually need a workflow or is there a better way ? And if a workflow is the best solution, how should it be done with jBPM ?

I am pretty sure that this kind of functionality is in lots of applications. So ... there might be some best practice for this kind of stuff ...

Thx in advance.
Dieter.

[kukeltje]

Dieter,

I totally miss your point.... the task he already started on stays visible in his list *in the case he/she does not finish it* . You could order the tasklist by priority first and started/not started second. So they just stay in his list...

And yes, this is in many apps, but from what I can tell, also in jBPM

[memius]

Ronald,
At this moment, those tasks are not really part of a process (ok, technically they are ... they get started and when they are done, that workflow branch is over).
They are created during the application... eg. you don't finish an email -> a 'send email task' is created.
It can be seen as a seperate task, not bound to any real process.

And that is my question : how should this be done ? How can you model these kind of tasks ... do you actually need a workflow for this or is there some other standard way of dealing with this kind of 'reminder' tasks.

[kukeltje]

It can be seen as a seperate task, not bound to any real process.

Yep, that is what I understood.... that is a normal 'usecase' of jBPM. You do not need a full workflow to start ad-hoc tasks... you could make a basic empty process where you start tasks on. If it works for you, it is ok with jBPM...no real do/don't issues here