Developing Custom Inbox using Coaches

Out of the box portal is JSP page which directly interacts with DB using AJAX listeners. And it also has more features like task assignment, task auto claim, task routing etc. OTB portal has dynamic inbox component, if another user picks a task which is assigned to the group, listener will sense it and can remove that task from user inbox as it is currently owned by some other user. Task list in your inbox is more dynamic with lots of event listeners which directly interact with DB seamlessly.

If you develop a custom inbox by using coaches in IBM BPM, Either you can query the database to get the list of tasks which are available for the user who is logged in or tou can use TWSearch API to find out the task list of active and eligible tasks for the user who is logged in.

You can also build a dynamic task table. But the issue is that, it is very complex and added more and more events listeners in on coach. This also slowdowns the performance of the coach and leads to script time out errors in IE. You can’t run more than 500k lines of script.

If you go for DB query approach, you need to query DB for each and every time and this does not seem to be a right option, if you want to build custom inbox for larger group. If in case, it is a small group, then it is OK.

If you use TWSearch API, you will be having the following:

Some organizations don’t allow the developers to directly interact with product DB. In such type of cases, you have to go for this option. It is like adding one more wrapper to DB approach. Instead of directly interacting with DB, you are using API’s to convert your code into DB scripts and get the response back. It is does not seem to be right option if you have larger group.