Starting with release 11g, all human task metadata is stored and managed in the Metadata Service (MDS) repository. The workflow service consists of many services that handle various aspects of human interaction with a business process.

Figure 27-6 shows the following workflow service components:

• Task Service:

  The task service provides task state management and persistence of tasks. In addition to these services, the task service exposes operations to update a task, complete a task, escalate and reassign tasks, and so on. The task service is used by Oracle BPM Worklist to retrieve tasks assigned to users. This service also determines if notifications are to be sent to users and groups when the state of the task changes. The task service consists of the following services.

  • Task Routing Service

    The task routing service offers services to route, escalate, and reassign the task. The service makes these decisions by interpreting a declarative specification in the form of the routing slip.

  • Task Query Service

    The task query service queries tasks for a user based on a variety of search criterion such as keyword, category, status, business process, attribute values, history information of a task, and so on.

  • Task Metadata Service

    The task metadata service exposes operations to retrieve metadata information related to a task.

• Identity Service

  The identity service is a thin web service layer on top of the Oracle Application Server 11g security infrastructure or any custom user repository. It enables authentication and authorization of users and the lookup of user properties, roles, group memberships, and privileges.

• Notification Service

  The notification service delivers notifications with the specified content to the specified user through the email, IM, and SMS channels. See Notifications from Human Workflow for more information.

• User Metadata Service

  The user metadata service manages metadata related to workflow users, such as user work queues, preferences, vacations, and delegation rules.

• Runtime Config Service

  The runtime config service provides methods for managing metadata used in the task service runtime environment. It principally supports management of task payload mapped attribute mappings.

• Evidence service

  The evidence service supports storage and nonrepudiation of digitally-signed workflow tasks.

Figure 27-7 shows the interactions between the services and the business process.