Universal Worklist Substitution Rules and SAP NetWeaver BPM
Hi Everyone,
As most of you might be aware of the ‘Substitution Rules’ feature in the SAP Universal Worklist, many of you might be wondering how and in what ways it might affect the tasks which apper in the UWL via a BPM Process and also the process as a whole.
Universal worklist Substitution rules are mostly used when a user wishes to selct a user from the portal UME to be his/her substitute in his absence.
Most commonly, Substitution Rules are used in times of a Planned /Unplanned Leave of a user.
As far as the creation, deletion, modification, activation and other such operations of the Substitution Rules, please refer to the following document:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-46785
Now, coming back to how this would affect the tasks which appear in the UWL or the BPM process as a whole, the good thing about this is that the SAP Process Platform is stable enough to handle the replacement of users.
The replacement of the ‘Potential Owners’ of the BPM tasks does not affect the BPM process in any way. The process engine will replace the Potential Owner of the task during process execution itself.
But few things should be kept in mind before the Substitution rules are created and activated:
1. Both, the original user and the new substitute should have the ‘bpem_enduser’ role which is for receiving tasks through a BPM process.
2. It should be checked that the original user and the substitute have similar/same roles on the UME so that in case there is some code written in the UI application which checks logged-in user roles. If this is not evaluated, few issues might be faced by the task at run-time.
If these 2 conditions are met, there are no issues whatsoever that can hamper either the substitution rules or the BPM Process.
Please provide inputs if I have missed out on anything. This is my first blog on SCN. 🙂 Hope it helps in some way.
Thanks & Regards,
Siddhant
Hi Siddhant,
I would like to add that in case you want to find the user who completed the task after a substitution or not (maybe for a reporting activity in your process), you can find it in
"Output Mapping" of the human activity -> "Task Output" -> "Task Attributes" -> "actualOwner"
Regards,
Vasillis
honestly i don't see any thing from article......
if i am not wrong, those two points have nothing to do with substitution......
Hi Jun,
The article illustrates only how to create and modify substitution rules in the UWL options.
The 2 points in this blog are just my observations. I illustrated them to avoid the problems I faced when I tried this.
There are instances in real time scenarios where the action types in the UI are based on the roles of the logged-in user.
If the roles of the original user and the substituted user differ, the code might just not function as desired.
That's the only reason I mentioned these 2 points in the blog.
Regards,
Siddhant
the article, i mean this blog....
those two points are quite obvious.....people having basic sense should know it.....
you will substitute the task to one who has no bpm access?
you will substitute task to one who has no authorization to execute?
As I have written the blog, it was an obligation on my part to mention these points. I cannot assume 'basic sense' of people.
For example, in Netweaver 7.31, you can choose any user from the UME for substitution.
If a user with lower privileges is chosen as a substitute, there are going to be problems.
So it was obvious on my part to mention this.
Thanks for this blog...