Traditional User portal basics — Using the Process Work workspace

The Process Work workspace is available to operators associated with the traditional ('fixed') portals WorkManager and WorkUser, and is where users update or resolve work items in an application.

For both workers and managers, this workspace provides fast access to the application functions they need to enter, find, and complete work.
For managers, this workspace provides fast access to the application functions they need to analyze business activity. Managers can monitor the worklists and workbaskets supporting their work group, move assignments around, adjust work schedules, and bulk-process work items.

For new development, the composite Worker and Manager portals make it easier to provide a more effective and pleasing user experience. See About Composite Portals.

In most Pega 7 installations, you can experiment with the PegaSample sample application to create and resolve work items to understand this workspace. This approach avoids any possible interference with application test data or real production data. See Sample application.

Entering the Process Work workspace

In the WorkUser portal, the Process Work workspace fills the right side of the screen on login.

In the WorkManager portal, click the Process Work bar to access the Process Work workspace. Use the controls in the home view (described below) to select a work pool, find work, enter work, or access your worklist.

As you use the links and controls on the home view, additional forms or displays appear in the workspace.

Click the home button to return to the home view.

Navigation panel — Selecting the work pool name

Depending on the settings in the user portal rule's Spaces tab, the portal may display, near the Pega logo, a drop-down menu where the user can select a work pool to work with.

If the user only has access to a single work pool, the drop-down menu does not need to be displayed.

If you have access to more than one work pool, the current work pool name determines which work types appear in the New... dialog box.

The choice of work pool name does not restrict the types of assignments you can see or process on your worklist.

Tip Work pool names appear on this work pool selector list in the order that the corresponding work pools are listed on the Work Pools array on the Layout tab of the access group. If the list is long, consider reordering the Work Pools array to present the applications alphabetically, or in another order meaningful to users.

Navigation panel — Entering new work items

To create a new work item, select a work type from the New drop-down list on the navigation panel. This list displays all the work types in the current application. If the work type you want to enter does not appear, select a different application name.

Select a work type from the list. The entry form for that work type appears in the workspace.

Navigation panel — Finding work

Use the Find area of the navigation panel to search for and access an existing work item or assignment:

When you know a work item ID, enter this in the By ID field and click Find. This search retrieves the open or resolved work item (in the currently selected application).
Select an approach from the Search for Work drop-down list to find unresolved work items you entered, work items identifying you as a party, work items in a specific workbasket, or work items that you recently updated. You can customize the criteria. (Additional search facilities are available within the workspace area.)
Click Get Most Urgent to let the system find an open assignment that you can work on. The results depends on settings in your Operator ID data instances. The system may search first through a specific list of workbaskets, or may take the top assignment from your worklist. (This button also appears at the bottom of user forms presented by the standard harness Work-.Confirm.)

By default, the Get Most Urgent button is linked to a standard activity named Work-.GetNextWork, which calls the standard activity Work-.GetNextWorkObject, part of the Process Engine API. Your application can override the standard activity, or use other Process Engine API calls to set parameters for the standard activity. See Maximizing user productivity with GetNextWork.

Workspace — Using the worklist (My Work In Progress)

This area contains the top portion of your worklist. Each row of the worklist identifies one assignment routed to you.

Interacting with the worklist

You can interact with the worklist in five ways:

Click..	To..
A row	Access the user form and begin processing the assignment.
Where-am-I? arrow ()	See a flow diagram and the location of the current assignment in that flow.
(Preview)	If your worklist display supports assignment preview, hold the mouse pointer over a work item ID. A pop-up preview of the assignment may appear. (This capability is available only when the optional Smart Info Settings values are configured on the Format tab of the list view rule that supports worklist display.)
Expand..	View additional assignments.
Expand and select a Work Type	Limit the display to assignments arising from a single work type. This is useful when a worklist contains many assignments. Select `ALL` as the Work Type or click the home button to return to the consolidated view.

Columns of the worklist

Columns of the worklist identify aspects of the assignment:

Heading	Description
Urgency	A calculated value between 1 (lowest) and 100 (highest) identifying the priority of this assignment (property Work-.pyUrgencyWork). Rows are sorted by decreasing urgency value. A yellow clock icon () appears after the goal time occurs. This becomes a red clock icon () after the deadline occurs.
ID	The unique identifier assigned by the application to this work item. A prefix or suffix portion of this identifier can help users remember the application or work type.
Subject	A brief text description of the entire work item, entered when the work item was entered (from property @baseclass.pyLabel).
Status	The status of the work item (property Work-.pyStatusWork).
Instructions	A brief characterization of the assignment, the value of the Assign-.pyInstructions property. Usually, this text is set in the Assignment Properties panel of the assignment when editing the flow. Instruction text that starts with the word `Error:` indicates a possible application or operational problem. A developer can research and dispose of these conditions, usually allowing processing of the assignment to resume. See Working with the Assignments in Error report.
Work Type	A label for this type of work item, selected when you or someone entered the object. (The system derives these labels from the Short Description field of the class rule for this work type.) This field does not appear in the expanded worklist display.

Workspace — Using the My Group area

The My Group area is available to work managers to review current assignments. You can examine the worklists of each user in your work group, and the contents of each workbasket associated with your work group.

Viewing an operator's worklist

Select a name from the View List for combo box to list the assignments on that operator's worklist. The list contains all operators in the work group.

Viewing the assignments in a workbasket

Select a workbasket from the View Queue for combo box to list the assignments in that workbasket. This list includes those workbaskets for which the Work Group field matches the Work Group field in your own Operator ID instance.

Managing operator schedules and profiles

You can mark a user as unavailable, record scheduled absences, and change their skill profile.

Click the Manage Operators Schedules and Profiles link.
Select a row of the resulting list that contains the Operator ID. (The list shows all the operators who are in the same organization and in the same work group as you.)
Click Availability to update availability, absences, or substitute operator processing. You can identify a single substitute operator, or a decision rule that computes a substitute operator.

Operators who are unavailable can still sign on, enter work, and process assignments. They can receive assignments through transfers, but not through routing.

Click the Skills button to review or revise the application skill profile. Routing activities may match assignments to users based on this information.

Managing workbaskets

Click the Manage Workbasket link to access the Data-Admin-WorkBasket data instances that define workbaskets associated with your work group.

This list includes those workbaskets for which the Work Group field matches the Work Group field in your own Operator ID instance.

Workspace — Using the My Process Actions area

The My Process Actions area is available only to work managers. Use this area to apply an action to all the assignments on a worklist or workbasket. This function is known as bulk processing.

For example, you can transfer assignments from one operator (within your group) to another, from one workbasket to another, or apply a flow action repeatedly to all the assignments on a worklist.

See WorkManager portal basics — Processing assignments in bulk.

Workspace — Using the Search for Work area

This area allows you to search for work items (in the currently selected application) based on work item status and one other criterion. In contrast to the Search for Work queries in the navigation panel, this query lets you search by attributes (property values) such as work item status, customer name, and so on.

Optionally, select a comparison type such as Starts with for the status value. Select a status value.
Select a work item property, such as Owner Org Unit.
Enter a comparison type and a value.
Click Search.

Tip This facility identifies properties by the Short Description. If the Short Description that appears is not meaningful to the application user, in most cases, you can override the property with another, choosing a more appropriate description. In most cases, choose a work type or work pool for the Applies To class of the new property.

Advanced feature You can search by any top-level property that is an exposed column in the database table holding the objects in the work pool. A database administrator can, in most cases, expose additional (non-aggregate) properties by changing the database schema, after which they appear here. When appropriate, a database administrator can create database indexes to further speed searches on specific fields, such as account numbers, telephone numbers, or other heavily used properties. See PDN article Create a database index to improve performance of searches for background on this feature.

Customizing the columns of the worklist display

Your application can customize the columns and appearance of the worklist by copying and modifying a gadget or a list view report.

The standard portals WorkUser and WorkManager reference, on the Tabs tab of the Portal rule form, a standard gadget named WorklistExpandContract. By default, this gadget is linked to the standard list view rule Assign-Worklist.Worklist.ALL, which defines the columns of the default worklist.

Use any of these approaches to customize the worklist display:

To choose a different order, different properties, or different presentation of properties in the Assign-Worklist class, override the Assign-Worklist.Worklist.ALL report.
In many applications, however, the properties of interest are only in the work class, not the Assign-Worklist class. To support customization, an alternative standard gadget (HTML rule Data-Gadget.WorklistDetail) is available. This gadget llnks to the standard list view Assign-Worklist.WorklistDetail.ALL, which you can use as-is, or override. Your list view can include as columns properties from both the Assign-Worklist class and the work item, through the join feature of the list view rule. For an example of this approach, see PDN article How to customize the worklist display using JOIN.
Customization using a list view defined on the Data-Assignment-Summary class was an older approach for customizing worklist columns, beginning with V4.2. The Data-Assignment-Summary class is linked to a view in the PegaRULES database. This approach remains supported. For an example, review the standard list view report Data-Assignment-Summary.Worklist_pegaSampleTask.ALL. For guidance, see PDN article How to customize the display of a worklist.