Continuing with same assignee vs making task available

[jlilley]

I have some cases where, when a user completes a task, I want the next user task to be still assigned to the same user.  In other cases, I want the task to be unassigned so that candidate users can pick it from the available queue.  How can I set up a flow to automatically do one vs the other?   I also have some cases where I want to assign the task to the user who started the process, vs leaving it unclaimed.  How can I do that?

Related but different: if someone who is an "administrator" of the system wants to move the assignment to someone else, would i first unclaim() the task and then claim() it with the new user?  Or can I reassign it in one step?

Sorry, this seems like a newbie question, but I'm not clear on how these things are typically done.

Thanks
john

[martin_grofcik]

Hi John,

I want the next user task to be still assigned to the same user

Set process variable before the task is created and use assignee expression to resolve assignee.

I want to assign the task to the user who started the process

http://activiti.org/userguide/index.html#bpmnStartEvents
initiator: identifies the variable name in which the authenticated user id will be stored when the process is started.

Regards
Martin

[jlilley]

Hi Martin, when you say "Set process variable before the task is created and use assignee expression to resolve assignee", I am not sure what you mean.  Within the BPMN designer, a user task has an "assignee" field.  Can I just put something in there like ${autoassignuser}?  OK, so if I do that, how do I extract the assignee from the previous user task and put it into the autoassignuser process variable?  I am trying to accomplish this within the BPMN flow, so that a process designer can specify these behaviors, without writing java code.

I *could* accomplish this sort of thing by interacting with our own code and conventions via an "extension" ability in the BPMN designer – some way to annotate each task or flow with extra information (like some JSON or XML).  But I don't see any fields in which to enter arbitrary stuff, other than the Documentation field, which doesn't seem like a good idea.

Thanks,
john