This walk-through will help you create your first task report and view it in a site. Task reports display task information with a link for users to open each task and begin working on it.
In this walk-through, we will:
The content below assumes a basic familiarity with interfaces, grids, and queries. Consider going through the SAIL and Grid Tutorials first.
Tip: The Appian Tutorial application is used throughout Appian tutorials. Skip the steps in this section if you've already created this application in another tutorial.
To begin with, we need to create an application to contain our design objects.
We will be creating the Appian Tutorial application for this tutorial. All of Appian's tutorials use the Appian Tutorial application as the reference application. After completing this tutorial, you can reuse this application as you work through other Appian tutorials.
To create the Appian Tutorial application:
In the Create New Application dialog, configure the following properties:
Property | Description |
---|---|
Name | Enter Appian Tutorial . |
Prefix | Keep the default prefix, AT , which Appian constructs using the initial characters of each word you entered in the Name parameter. We'll be following the recommended naming standard, and using this short, unique prefix whenever we name an object in this application. |
Description | Leave blank. It's normally a best practice to add descriptions to all design objects. However, to save a little time during this tutorial, we'll skip adding descriptions unless the description displays to the end user. |
Generate groups and folders to secure and organize objects | Keep this checkbox selected, so that Appian will automatically generate standard groups and folders and assign default security groups for this application. |
In the Review Application Security dialog, keep the default security settings. Because we selected the Generate groups and folders option in the previous step, Appian automatically uses the AT Users and AT Administrator groups it generated to set our application security appropriately.
Tip: The security of the application object is unrelated to the security of each of the objects contained within the application. This means that you will need to set security permissions for every object in an application in addition to the application object itself. For more information about security permissions for the application object, see Application Security.
Click SAVE.
Right now, the application contains the folders and groups Appian generated automatically. To see these, click Build in the navigation pane. Each design object that you create during the course of this tutorial will appear in this list in the Build view and be associated with the tutorial application.
Before we create the task report interface, we need to create a constant for the My Tasks process report. This constant will be used in the interface that we will create in the next step.
AT_MY_TASKS_REPORT
.My Tasks
and select the document that is suggested. If no suggestions appear for My Tasks
, search for and use active_tasks
instead.AT Rules & Constants
folder that is suggested.To learn more about creating process reports, see Configuring Process Reports.
Now we will create an interface to be used to display the task report data in a grid. We will use the Task Report drag and drop pattern as the basis for our expression.
The Task Report pattern does the following:
a!queryProcessAnalytics()
system function to display data from the process report in a grid.For a more detailed breakdown of this pattern, see the Task Report pattern page.
Note that while we are using a built-in report for this example, any process report can potentially be queried.
AT_myTasksReport
.AT Rules & Constants
folder that is suggested.The newly created interface will open in a new tab by default. If you don't see a new tab, check your browser to see if you have pop-ups enabled.
To add the Task Report pattern to your interface:
Once the pattern is added to your interface, you should see the following:
To adapt the task report pattern to work with your data, you need to update the local!taskReportData
local variable to use a process analytics query that calls the My Tasks
constant and document that you created earlier.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
local!taskReportData: a!queryProcessAnalytics(
report: cons!AT_MY_TASKS_REPORT,
query: a!query(
pagingInfo: a!pagingInfo(
startIndex: 1,
batchSize: 10,
sort: a!sortInfo(
field: "c2",
ascending: true
)
),
filter: a!queryFilter(
field: "c5",
operator: "in",
value: local!statusFilter,
applyWhen: a!isNotNullOrEmpty(local!statusFilter)
)
)
),
cons!AT_MY_TASK_REPORT
, you don't have to update it.Tip: If you want to see more than 10 reports in the grid, increase the batch size on line 37.
When you replace the placeholder data in the pattern with your own constant and process analytics query, a new Assigned To column appears. (Don't forget to click TEST to see your changes in the preview.) Right now, this column uses the default formatting.
Let's update it to look a little cleaner.
To reformat the Assigned To column we need to add whenTrue and then parameters to the a!match()
function (line 102). This a!match()
function is used to format the columns.
The new parameters basically say: for the column whose field value equals c8
, use specific formatting. To learn more about how to determine which column c8
maps to, see the Task Report Pattern.
To reformat the Assigned To column:
default: local!fieldValue
on line 132.Copy and paste the following expression ino the new line.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
/* Format Assigned To field */
whenTrue: fv!item.field = "c8",
then: a!richTextDisplayField(
value: a!forEach(
items: fv!row.c8,
expression: if(
/* Check if User type (4), otherwise it's a Group (5) */
runtimetypeof(fv!item) = 4,
a!richTextItem(
text: user(fv!item, "firstName") & " " & user(fv!item, "lastName") & char(10),
link: a!userRecordLink(user: fv!item),
linkStyle: "STANDALONE"
),
/* Adding char(10) adds line breaks to the list of names */
group(fv!item, "groupName") & char(10)
)
)
),
The Assigned To column updates to use the new formatting.
Note: The Assigned To column will look different for every task report. If your tasks only have one assignee, the "Assigned To" column will only show the one assignee. If the report you're using doesn't have an Assigned To column, there won't be one shown here. Learn more about configuring and adding rows to process reports.
You can use task reports in both sites or in Tempo. For most uses, you'll likely want to show your task report in a site, but we've added an optional step here to show you how to view your site in Tempo.
To create a site to view your task in:
Tasks
.Tasks Site
.To add your task report interface to your site:
My Tasks
.tasks
and select one of the returned icons.AT_myTasksReport
or the name of your interface and select it.Now, let's check out your site and task report! Click the URL under the Web Address field to view your site.
To use your task report on Tempo:
My Tasks
.Now if you visit the Tasks tab in Tempo, you will see a link for the My Tasks report below the default filters.
Task Report Tutorial