There is a question I’ve been meaning to ask for a while.
One of the stated best practices is that greenfield developments should use Camunda’s out of the box (OOTB) TaskList web application instead of writing their own. This obviously is a huge savings in time over duplicating the generous amount of functionality present in the TaskList. There is another reason to use the OOTB TaskList as well. I’ve seen multiple projects fail now because of making bad design decisions when creating a custom TaskList application. So, I definitely agree that using the OOTB TaskList is a best practice for greenfield development efforts.
Another stated best practive is that only the minimal amount of business process data should be stored in a process application using process variables - maybe just enough to drive the process through its various decision gates. Now consider user tasks. It is frequently the case that embedded user task forms need to capture, store and later retrieve business data that is not crucial to the flow of a process instance. An example might be a customer’s street address. Let’s just assume that this kind of data exists and must be handled in embedded forms.
Now, if we should not store this information in process variables, how does one go about capturing, storing and later retrieving this kind of data using embedded user task forms?
I hope you can find what you are looking for in our series “Customizing and Extending Camunda Tasklist”.
3 stories have been published and more are coming
Our next story would be “Associating business data with a process instance”
I have skimmed over your articles. There is still much that I would need to digest, but I see that you have grappled significantly with the subject matter of my post.
My current impression is that to duplicate what you have done isn’t for the faint of heart. I had hoped that the applicable techniques would be simpler. I’m sure that I will be delving in again and hopefully I’ll get the hang of it.
I would very much like to get reactions from the good folks at Camunda on this. Has @hassang approached the problem in the simplest and still effective manner? Do you have any alternate suggestions?
I think this is important subject matter. I have seen more than one Camunda effort fail due to mistakes made developing a custom TaskList application.
There are likely to be a number of alternatives, but I would simply suggest that if you’re planning on keeping tasklist the suggestion that @hassang is making is a really great one. While there are other options for sure, his experience in actually building this is very valuable.
Other options would be to using Tastlist as a template and build something new that integrates the data in the specific way you want it.
I think it is a common use case to refresh the referenced process variables upon loading the form or to fetch data from external sources and these links provide a great way to do that using camunda 7.
Is there also a description how to do this in Camunda 8 Tasklist? I do not see any option to have this as a first class citizen, nor do I see a way to manipulate the rendered html code.
If not, is this a feature that is on the roadmap and when can it be expected?
Hi @Patrick - can you please open a new topic with your questions around C8 Tasklist? This is the C7 category, and also a very old topic; you’ll get better answers and support in the C8 category with a new thread.