This section provides an overview of how specifying the expiration duration at this level makes this setting the expiration duration of the task across all the participants.

For example, participant LoanAgentGroup and participant Supervisor have three days to act on the task between them, as shown in Figure 29-50:

If there is no expiration specified at either the participant level or this routing slip level, then that task has no expiration duration.

If expiration duration is specified at any level of the participants, then for that participant, the participant expiration duration is used. However, the global expiration duration is still used for the participants that do not have participant level expiration duration. The global expiration duration is always decremented by the time elapsed in the task.

The policy for interpreting the participant level expiration for the participants is described as follows:

• Serial

  Each assignment in the management chain gets the same expiration duration as the one specified in the serial. The duration is not for all the assignments resulting from this assignment. If the task expires at any of the assignments in the management chain, the escalation and renewal policy is applied.

• Parallel:

  • In a parallel workflow, if the parallel participants are specified as a resource, a routing slip is created for each of the resources. The expiration duration of each created routing slip follows these rules:

    The expiration duration equals the expiration duration of the parallel participant if it has an expiration duration specified.

    The expiration duration that is left on the task if it was specified at the routing slip level.

    Otherwise, there is no expiration duration.

  • If parallel participants are specified as routing slips, then the expiration duration for the parallel participants is determined by the routing slip.