human tasks and actors(users)

[bwallis42]

I don't understand the use of the Actors property in a workflow human task node.

When I design a workflow I have no idea who the actors/users are going to be. I would have in mind a set of roles that a user interacting with the workflow would need to have to be allowed to perform certain tasks and these roles would map to groups on the human task nodes.

But what is the reason for having a property on a node that includes the actual name of one or more users?

[salaboy21]

You can use GroupIDs. There are some situations where you want to specify a particular actorId for the task. So it needs to be there

[bwallis42]

Thanks,

So what effect at the TaskService API does setting one or more users have? Does this assign it to those users?

Is there any documentation on the TaskService methods, I'm trying to guess from the names what each of the methods do. Some are obvious, others I'm not so sure. For example, the difference between delegate, forward and nominate.

    void activate(long taskId, String userId);

    void claim(long taskId, String userId);

    void claimNextAvailable(String userId, String language);

    void complete(long taskId, String userId, Map<String, Object> data);

    void delegate(long taskId, String userId, String targetUserId);

    void exit(long taskId, String userId);

    void fail(long taskId, String userId, Map<String, Object> faultData);

    void forward(long taskId, String userId, String targetEntityId);

    void release(long taskId, String userId);

    void resume(long taskId, String userId);

    void skip(long taskId, String userId);

    void start(long taskId, String userId);

    void stop(long taskId, String userId);

    void suspend(long taskId, String userId);

    void nominate(long taskId, String userId, List<OrganizationalEntity> potentialOwners);

[salaboy21]

Good question, the Human Task Service is based in WebService Human Task Specification: http://docs.oasis-open.org/bpel4people/ws-humantask-1.1-spec-cs-01.html

The specification defines the behaviours for those methods

[bwallis42]

Thanks, got a bit of reading to do. Relevant section of the document seems to be 7.1, most of the methods are described there as well as references to the states and transitions.