IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Developing business processes > Building human tasks > Defining the people assignment criteria

Predefined people assignment criteria

Predefined people assignment criteria are provided for retrieving sets of users from people directories.

You can use people assignment criteria (previously known as staff verbs) in IBM Integration Designer to specify people assignments in a human task. These criteria are transformed during modeling and deployment into a set of queries that can be run on a people directory. The parameters for the following predefined people assignment criteria are listed here:

• Department members
• Group
• Groups
• Group members
• Group members without named users
• Group members without filtered users
• Group search
• Intersection of group members
• Manager of employee
• Manager of employee by user ID
• Native query
• Person search
• Role members
• User records by user ID
• Users records by user ID without named users
• Users
• Users by user ID
• Users by user ID and groups
• Users by user ID without named users

Consider the following when you assign people assignment criteria:

• If you are working with large groups of people, the Group people assignment criteria works best because it handles the members of a group as a unit. This allows you to transfer a human task from one group to another group easily. A person's group membership is resolved when the person logs in and accesses a human task.

• To individually assign people that belong to a group to a human task, the Group Members people assignment criteria provides an alternative to the group assignment. The Group Members people assignment criteria creates an assignment for each person individually. This assignment can then be transferred to another person. Substitution can occur, that is, a person that is absent can be replaced by another person. A variant of this people assignment criteria, Group Members without Named Users supports the separation-of-duties assignment pattern.

  Assigning people to a group individually can affect performance at run time, especially when assigning more than a few people to the group.

• To assign a few people to a human task that do not all belong to the same group, consider using the User Records by user ID people assignment criteria definition. You can also use this definition when the people assignment is not statically defined during modeling, but includes replacement expressions. Replacement expressions can refer to a custom property or the input message of a human task. In the case of referring to an input message element, the element can also be defined as array. In this case, all array elements are used as user IDs. The Users by user ID people assignment criteria definition is similar to the User Records by user ID definition. Although the Users by user ID definition performs better than the User Records by user ID definition at run time, it provides less functionality:
  • It does not check if the user IDs are entered correctly
  • It does not retrieve, for example, the email addresses for the user IDs specified, which makes it less suitable for assigning people to email escalations

• The Everybody people assignment criteria definition is also worth considering. It indicates that all authenticated users are assigned to the human task. While there are cases where all people in an organization can do a certain job, this definition is particularly useful during development, or when rapidly prototyping an application.

• The list of people assignment criteria that you see is filtered by your choice of people directory provider. If you choose Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) as your provider, then criteria that are appropriate only for virtual member manager will not be displayed.

Department members

Use this criteria to retrieve the members of a department. It is supported by the LDAP, and the virtual member manager people directory providers.

Defining the people assignment criteria

Parameter	Use	Type	Description