Add Manual Task
Unlike Bot Tasks that are completed automatically, Manual Tasks (MT) require involving a human who is either a cloud worker or an internal employee.
See steps to work with Manual Task
The basic steps to create and run a Manual Task are as illustrated and described below:
Add a Manual Task to a Business Process (BP) flow as described in the instruction.
Design an MT form layout. To see how the task form layout will look in the Workspace interface, click the Preview button.
Configure the parameters to run the designed MT as described in the instruction.
Run the Business Process with the Manual Task according to the instruction.
Once the Business Process is at the Manual Task step, log in to Workspace as a worker, find the created task, and complete it. Use the instructions in the Process Manual Tasks section.
Check the MT result on the Results tab for the executed Business Process. For details, refer to the View Business Process results topic.
Add Manual Task to Business Process flow
To add an MT to a BP flow, navigate to the Workflow tab and use one of the following methods:
Create from scratch: drag the MT element from the toolbar to the canvas. In this case, a blank task is created, and you will need to select an Operation, set contracts, and design a form layout from scratch.
Add a ready-to-use task: on the Reusable components panel, navigate to the Manual tab, drag an option to the canvas, and edit the task configuration if needed. In this case, any changes you make to the task are propagated to all BPs where the task is used.
Alternatively, click the Copy button for an MT option, in which case an independent task copy is created. You can then drag the created copy to the canvas and edit the task configuration as needed. The changes you make are not propagated to the source task or other independent copies of the same task.
If you add a ready-to-use task, you do not need to select an Operation. Proceed to edit contracts and edit a form layout if needed.
Select Task Designer Operation
If you create an MT from scratch and double-click the element in the BP flow, you see a page with a list of available Operations representing various task templates.
To design an MT, the recommended choice is the Task Designer Operation. The operation category provides a no-code way to implement Manual Task forms: to generate them from template or other models or to build them manually in a drag-and-drop editor. Open the Task Designer Operation category in the list, choose a task type, and click Select.
You are redirected to the MT configuration editor. Your next steps are to set contracts and design a form layout.
Set contracts
Input and output contracts facilitate MT integration into a BP and streamline data flows to and from the step. Contracts define what data comes to an MT as input and what data flows from the MT to the next step in a BP.
For an MT step, you need to set only input contracts. The output contracts are fetched automatically from previous steps based on the MT design. Typically, the output step variable is task_result.
To set the input contracts, navigate to the Input / Output tab and follow the steps below:
Make sure the Enable Input / Output connection toggle is on.
In the Input section, set the step's input variable types and names based on your knowledge of what data is going to be processed in the task.
In the Type dropdown, hover over a variable type and click Select. To create a new variable type, click New Object and follow the instructions in the guide.
To set a variable name, move the pointer over an option in the Step variable list and click Select. To select a nested value within an option, open the nesting list and click a required item.
To add a custom variable, open the Step variable drop-down list, click Custom variable, and enter a required value.
If needed, you can also remap the step and process variables as described in the guide.
warningDefine contracts carefully to match the step logic. The WorkFusion platform can't verify if a step contract is correct from the perspective of the correspondent step logic.
Add as many input contracts as you need by clicking Input and setting the step variable type and names as described in step 2.
The contracts you set on the Input / Output tab become available for mapping in the Property name field on the API configuration pages for Task Designer components.
On the Input / Output tab, click Save to save the created contracts.
For details on setting step contracts, see the Configure input and output contracts in Business Process topic.
Map Task Designer components to input data
The table below lists best-practice examples of how you can match the data types received by MTs from other BP steps and Task Designer components to obtain an optimal task design.
| Data type | Task Designer component |
|---|---|
Array of objects (for instance, [{...}, {...}]) | Data grid, Edit grid |
Array with primitives (for instance, ["one", 2, false]) | Keywords |
|
|
Design Manual Task form
To design a form layout for a created MT, navigate to the Design tab. For detailed instructions, see the Design Manual Task forms guide.
Set Manual Task properties
To set the properties of an MT, navigate to the Task properties tab.
Set priority
The Task priority setting changes the task ranking in the search results of target endpoints. Tasks with the highest priority are displayed at the top.
To set a priority for an MT, choose an option from the Task Priority drop-down list. The Normal is the default priority.
This is how the setting works: suppose, you have two similar MTs, and you want workers to complete the second MT in the first turn. For that, set the second MT's priority to High. The worker will see the MT at the top of the assignment list in Workspace.
Configure expiration period
The Task Expires in setting allows you to define a period after which an MT expires if nobody accepts it. Once the task expires, it is no longer available in Workspace.
By default, MTs are set to expire in 30 days. To extend the expiration period, change the values in the boxes.
Get task URL
The External form URL field contains the URL for previewing the Manual Task. It is populated automatically based on the used endpoint.
In case you have issues with Manual Task steps, look for troubleshooting tips in the following support guides: