making the engine, embedded in own application, start dialog

[claz]

Hello,

I am trying to integrate the activity engine in our own Java application, which is pretty simple thanks to the helpful user guide and lots of blog posts.
But now I arrived at the advanced part:
A user claims a task (within a view  in our application), which he then sees in his own tasks. Then he starts to work on it, which opens up a dialog from our application (served with additional data through e.g. variables). When he is ready with his work, the task will be completed.
Which strategy would be best to make activiti start the application dialogs?
First I thought 'a delegate, that is really nice. I can handle the startup this way', BUT this delegate starts a thread, which is waiting for completion (if I properly understood). So Service Tasks do not seem to be the proper solution. But which alternative do I have? Implementing my own FormEngine maybe?

On the other hand Service Tasks are the only kind of tasks which can be customized for Eclipse Activiti Designer. This is hopefully no showstopper, because I planned to provide certain customized types of tasks (e.g. 'finance backend') where you just have to define the name of the dialog and candidates. After my first researches concerning this point I am a bit worried..

Any advice would be helpful.
Thank you very much in advance.

[frederikherema1]

Activity shouldn't start the application dialogs. The application-logic that calls the activiti API should handle all UI stuff, and just pass in what the user filled in in your form/ui. From there, activiti takes over and works it's way through the process.

Since you control (call the Activiti API) when your screen is shown and when the form is submitted, there is no need to have "screen/ui" logic in your process.

[claz]

Thank you very much for your quick answer.

Oh wow.. I had to think about it, but I think I got your point. Some time has passed by since I experimented with activity and so i was stuck on a problem that doesn't exist. My engineController then takes over and at the end informs the activity engine about task completion and some variable values.

In that case there is one question left concerning the Eclipse Activiti Designer. Isn't there a way to customize userTasks to keep them as simple and suitable for our purposes?
When a customer creates own Processes I want him to have a palette of tasks where he e.g. just has to define the dialog name and the type of this task lets the controller know which kind of backend is needed. The more self-explanatory the elements in the designer are, the better is the acceptance.