Self Service and User Requests - Interacting with Workflow Processes

When a process instance starts it can create a record of what happens during the process using the History Worker. As the instance progresses events and summary events can be logged to that history.

Summaries and a log of events are displayed to users when they click on a card in the User Requests template or from the process descriptions in the Self Service template.

Summary Events

Summary events are a special type of history event that can be added to a history by the start and complete workflow action form fields.

Summary events store a copy of the submitted form's field values. These values are used by the User Requests and Self Service templates to display the "Summary Details" section in the screenshot above. New summaries are written as a workflow progresses and the templates show the most recent one.

There's a more technical look at history events and summaries in the History Events and Summary Events article in the history worker documentation.

Displaying History Data in Self Service and User Requests

These example screenshots show the User Requests template. The same information can be found in the Self Service template by clicking on a request's description.

The Summary

In both User Requests and Self Service, a summary can be displayed above the list of history events when you view the details/description of a request.

By default, a summary is displayed using a read-only version of the form that started the workflow. The image above shows a summary of our process once the start form has been submitted. The field labels are on the left, and the values entered by the user are on the right.

Once the process has ended, this image shows what our summary looks like:

It's exactly the same as the summary at the start of the process! There's no record of the response added by our agent. That's because the summary is still being displayed by the read-only version of the form that recorded the first summary. That form didn't include a field for the response, so even though the response has been saved, there isn't a field to display it in.

Displaying Summaries in a Different Form

To get around this problem the Start Workflow form field lets you pick the form that will be used to display the summary. This means you have complete control over the fields on the form, and what information appears.

In the screenshot above, our STARTASIMPLEPROCESS form is going to display its summary using a form called DISPLAYSUMMARY.

As long as your new summary form includes fields with the same names as the fields you want to display, the data will appear.

Here's the summary form:

It includes two fields from the form used to start the process, and one field from the agent response form. The fields have the same names as they do in the other forms: NAME, QUERY and RESPONSE

And here's the new summary, displayed in our new form.

Event Lists and Details

Beneath the summary, both Self Service and User Requests can display a list of the events that took place during the history of a process.

In this example you can see (from bottom to top):

1. The event written when the form was submitted. The title of this event is set in the Workflow Start action field's "Event description" property
2. The summary event generated by the workflow engine when the form was submitted
3. The event written when AGENT1 completed the user task. The title of this event is the name of the user task in the workflow model
4. The details of user task (on the right). This is displayed using the form that created the event. This can be changed in exactly the same way as the main self service summary described above, by picking a different form in the "Form Name" property of the Workflow Complete Task action field of the form that generated this event
5. The summary event generated by the workflow engine when the task form was submitted
6. The end event generated by the workflow engine. In versions of iCM prior to 10.0.7.0 this will always be "Process Ended". In later versions this can be set using the _finalHistoryDescription process variable

All of our events have "View details" buttons because all of our user actions have been set to store form data with them. Summary events do this automatically, standard history events need to be told to store form data in the various form action fields.

Hiding the Summaries

In the article configuration (the article extras) for Self Service and User Requests, you can choose whether or not summary events are shown in the event list. We generally recommend not showing them because, if your history events are storing form data, the summary will be a duplicate of the standard event below it in the list.