Feture Request: Task subjects

[dmigowski]

Hi, all,

While trying to find an acceptable solution for presenting occuring tasks to my fellow users, I completely found one feature missing: Task subjects.

Currently the only way to tell my users what the task actually does is to render the form object for them. This is not really useful for presenting tasks in a list. And VacationRequest-1, VacationRequest-2 are no useful names either.

I currently need nothing more than a new attribute "subject" in the task tag, which simply contains an expression, where I can generate text like "Vacation Request of Guillaume Retard for April 2010", "Order confirmation for order A090023 of ACME Manufacturing (London)". Those who work with their task lists could easily identify tasks they delayed because they had to gather other information first, and come back then.

My other workaround would be to implement form evaluation each time a task node is reached, and the persisting the form in a parallel table.

PLEASE COMMENT IF YOU LIKE THIS FEATURE!

[dmigowski]

I implemented it now for myself, was much easier than i thought. You wrote great code, I have to say, easy to read and understand (if you already managed to understand the wire stuff before).

If there is interest, I create a patch.

[kukeltje]

(almost) every node should get a description in the jPDL. This is kind of the same as a subject. Please look in the jira for this. I think there already is an issue for it.

[dmigowski]

Yes, I found descriptions when I compared the 4.0 and 4.2 XSDs. But the description is not automatically evaluated by the expression engine, which is what I need here.

[sebastian.s]

Where is the difference between your subject-attribute and the task's name and description?

[dmigowski]

Hello Sebastian,

The differences are:
1. The subject is evaluated during Task instantiation.
2. It is stored in the database in the jbpm_task and jbpm_taskhist tables, and can be queried to provide a nice list.

[kukeltje]

Parsing attributes runtime (So EL is possible) is also another issue in the jira. Combined they will provide what you need. But patches for these issues are always welcome ;-)

[dmigowski]

Sorry, I don't understand you here... Would my "subject" patch be integrated, or is there another JIRA issue you wanted to draw my attention on?

[sebastian.s]

https://jira.jboss.org/jira/browse/JBPM-1209

I think Ronald wanted to point you to this issue which is about extending the support for expressions. This would mean that you could also use an expression to evaluate task's description. So it could be set at runtime. Please read the issue description and check if the description for tasks is planned to be included. Then comment on the issue if you have further suggestions.

[kukeltje]

Sebastian is correct.