NEW ISSUE: Comment propagation

TARGET: BPEL4People

DESCRIPTION:

Sometimes the comments that are collected during the execution of one people activity need to be visible to people working on later people activities. This is not currently possible.

It also should be possible to access the comments of a task from XPath expressions in the B4P process. This would make it possible to record the comments in some other document.

PROPOSED RESOLUTION:

Introduce a new child element of a people activity:

<b4p:propagateCommentsFrom>

<b4p:activityRef>peopleActivityName</b4p:activityRef>*

</b4p:propagateCommentsFrom>

This causes any comments that are present on the named people activities to be copied into the context of the target activity at the time that the target activity becomes ready to execute. If more than one activity in the process has a name referenced from a <b4p:activityRef> element, then all matching activities have their comments propagated. Since comment IDs are unique only within a single task, when comments are propagated they may get new IDs.

We should also add a new XPath function “b4p:getComments(activityName)”, which returns the comments for a task using WS-HT’s existing tComment type.

To support these changes, the tHumantTaskContext type needs to change to include a <comments> child element, analogous to the <attachments> element.

bpel4people message